What, then, shall we say to the opinion of the great Chief Justice?--for, after all, his is not a name to be dealt with lightly. Well, first, it was a dictum, not a decision of the court. Next, in another and later case, before the same eminent jurist, came a constitutional expounder as eminent and as generally accepted,--none other than Daniel Webster,--who took precisely the opposite view. He was discussing the condition of certain territory on this continent which we had recently acquired. Said Mr. Webster: "What is Florida? It is no part of the United States. How can it be? Florida is to be governed by Congress as it thinks proper. Congress might have done anything--might have refused a trial by jury, and refused a legislature." After this flat contradiction of the court's former dictum, what happened? Mr. Webster won his case, and the Chief Justice made not the slightest reference to his own previous and directly conflicting opinion! Need we give it more attention now than Marshall did then? Mr. Webster maintained the same position long afterward, in the Senate of the United States, in opposition to Mr. John C. Calhoun, and his view has been continuously sustained since by the courts and by congressional action. In the debate with Mr. Calhoun in February, 1849, Mr. Webster said: "What is the Constitution of the United States? Is not its very first principle that all within its influence and comprehension shall be represented in the Legislature which it establishes, with not only a right of debate and a right to vote in both houses of Congress, but a right to partake in the choice of President and Vice-President?... The President of the United States shall govern this territory as he sees fit till Congress makes further provision.... We have never had a territory governed as the United States is governed.... I do not say that while we sit here to make laws for these territories, we are not bound by every one of those great principles which are intended as general securities for public liberty. But they do not exist in territories till introduced by the authority of Congress.... Our history is uniform in its course. It began with the acquisition of Louisiana. It went on after Florida became a part of the Union. In all cases, under all circumstances, by every proceeding of Congress on the subject and by all judicature on the subject, it has been held that territories belonging to the United States were to be governed by a constitution of their own,... and in approving that constitution the legislation of Congress was not necessarily confined to those principles that bind it when it is exercised in passing laws for the United States itself." Mr. Calhoun, in the course of this debate, asked Mr. Webster for judicial opinion sustaining these views, and Mr. Webster said that "the same thing has been decided by the United States courts over and over again for the last thirty years."