From the time of John Jay, the first Chief Justice, down to the present day the men appointed to membership in the Court have, for the most part, been lawyers of the highest character and standing, many of whom had already won distinction in other branches of the public service. The present Chief Justice (Taft) is an ex-President of the United States. Among the other members of the Court are a former Secretary of State of the United States (Justice Day); two former Attorneys General of the United States (Justices McKenna and McReynolds); a former Chief Justice of Massachusetts (Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, the distinguished son and namesake of an illustrious father); a former Chief Justice of Wyoming (Justice Van Devanter); and a former Chancellor of New Jersey (Justice Pitney). It is well that the personnel of the Court has been such as to command respect and deference, for in actual power the judiciary is by far the weakest of the three coördinate departments (legislative, executive, judicial) among which the functions of government were distributed by the Constitution. The power of the purse is vested in Congress: it alone can levy taxes and make appropriations. The Executive is Commander-in-Chief of the Army and Navy and wields the appointing power. The Supreme Court controls neither purse nor sword nor appointments to office. Its power is moral rather than physical. It has no adequate means of enforcing its decrees without the coöperation of other branches of the Government. That coöperation has not always been forthcoming. In the year 1802, Congress, at the instigation of President Jefferson, the inveterate enemy of Chief Justice Marshall, suspended the sessions of the Court for more than a year by abolishing the August term. In 1832, when the State of Georgia defied the decree of the Court in a case involving the status of the Cherokee Indians, the other departments of the Federal Government gave no aid and President Andrew Jackson is reported to have remarked: "John Marshall has made the decision, now let him execute it." In 1868, Congress, in order to forestall decision in a case pending before the Court, hastily repealed the statute on which the jurisdiction of the Court depended.[1] Such instances, however, have been rare. The law-abiding instinct is strong in the American people, and for the most part the decisions of the Supreme Court have been received with respect and unquestioning obedience. [Footnote 1: See _ex parte McCardle_, 6 Wall. (Supreme Court Reports), 318; 7 _id._, 506.] The chief weapon in the arsenal of the Court is the power to declare legislative acts void on the ground that they overstep limits established by the people in the Constitution. This power has been frequently exercised. It is stated that the congressional statutes thus nullified have not numbered more than thirty, while at least a thousand state laws have been nullified.[1]