constitution to suit the views of the monopolists who are already clothed with too much power. If it is important that men elected to congress and state legislatures should be in sympathy with the people in their struggle to regain their rights, now usurped by the different monopolies of the country; and if it is necessary that the executive departments of the state and national government should be filled with men who are friends of the people and in favor of restricting corporations within proper and legitimate bounds,--it is of vastly more importance that the seats of justice, the courts of the country, should be filled and controlled by men who, instead of deciding cases according to their own personal views of what the constitution ought to be, will accept it in letter and spirit as it is, and decide accordingly. An inordinate desire to interpret the fundamental law, to give it a new meaning, or, as it is commonly expressed, for amending the constitution by judicial legislation, seems to have seized the courts, and has been followed to such length as to make it almost impossible for even the courts themselves to decide when an act is constitutional and when it is not. A new decision is made as often as a new judge is appointed, not unfrequently overruling the long settled decisions of the courts. These decisions, no matter how absurd or unjust, must be accepted by the whole country as the supreme law of the land. Of late years, by accident or design, most of the decisions on questions of a general nature have been adverse to the interests of the people, and in favor of monopolies. Newly appointed judges, scarcely warm in their seats, have not hesitated to overrule the decisions of "Marshall," of "Story," and "Chase;" to disregard the views of "Webster," of "Adams," of "Jefferson," of "Washington," and "Hamilton," on constitutional questions. Their own personal views have been substituted for constitutional law, until the protection that instrument is supposed to afford the private citizen is entirely destroyed, and the absolute control of the government is transferred to the few monopolists, who, under the sanction of the courts, oppress the whole people. Whatever reform may be effected in the legislative and executive departments of the government, no real reform can obtain without a reformation of the courts.