Moreover, the Constitution of the United States would probably never have been adopted if the people had understood, as is now pretended, that Congress was to be at liberty to disregard constitutional limitations and guaranties and that there would be no way whatever of preventing a violation by Congress of the constitutional rights of the individual except at the polls. All students of our history know that the Constitution was accepted by the people upon the distinct pledge that amendments embodying a bill of rights to protect the individual against Congress would be immediately adopted. And one of the first acts of the First Congress in September, 1789, was to submit the ten amendments known as the federal bill of rights, which were thereupon ratified by the states and became an integral part of the Constitution. But of what avail or benefit were these amendments if Congress was not to be effectively restrained and bound by them? It is no exaggeration to say that if the courts should now be deprived of the power to protect litigants who invoke constitutional guaranties and should be compelled to enforce, as valid laws, statutes which violate the limitations upon legislative power which the people have deliberately embodied in their fundamental law, our constitutions would become dead letters, and we might as well turn to the pure and unrestrained democracy of Greece and await her fate. In an inspiring address delivered this year before the New York State Bar Association on the subject of judicial decisions and public feeling, Senator Root eloquently said: "A sovereign people which declares that all men have certain inalienable rights, and imposes upon itself the great impersonal rules of conduct deemed necessary for the preservation of those rights, and at the same time declares that it will disregard those rules whenever, in any particular case, it is the wish of a majority of its voters to do so, establishes as complete a contradiction to the fundamental principles of our government as it is possible to conceive. It abandons absolutely the conception of a justice which is above majorities, of a right in the weak which the strong are bound to respect. It denies the vital truth taught by religion and realized in the hard experience of mankind, and which has inspired every constitution America has produced and every great declaration for human freedom since Magna Carta--the truth that human nature needs to distrust its own impulses and passions, and to establish for its own control the restraining and guiding influence of declared principles of action."