either law or proceeding is contrary to the constitution. It spurns the warning of Lord Bacon to his ideal judge, in consulting with the king and the state, “to remember that Solomon’s throne was supported with lions on both sides; let them (the judges) be lions, but lions under the throne, circumspect, that they do not check or oppose any point of sovereignty.” Such power no other tribunal in any country of the world possesses. No other country has a court whose power is absolute to thwart, even the present will of the nation, by declaring it out of harmony with a fundamental law adopted a century ago. Caleb Cushing thus addressed the Supreme Court: “You are the incarnate mind of the political body of the nation. In the complex institutions of our country, you are the pivot upon which the rights and liberties of all government and people alike turn; or, rather, you are the central light of constitutional wisdom around which they perpetually revolve.” The question of the court being identical with or independent of the legislature of the supreme or federal government, and the separation of the legislative and the judicial functions of government, is strongly set forth in No. 78 of the “Federalist,” written by Alexander Hamilton: “Some perplexity respecting the rights of the courts to pronounce legislative acts void, because contrary to the constitution, has arisen from an imagination that the doctrine would imply a superiority of the judiciary to the legislative power. It is urged that the authority which can declare the acts of another void, must necessarily be superior to the one whose acts may be declared void. There is no position which depends on clearer principles, than that every act of a delegated authority, contrary to the tenor of the commission under which it is exercised, is void. No legislative act, therefore, contrary to the constitution, can be valid. If it be said that the legislative body are themselves the constitutional judges of their own powers, and that the construction they put upon them is conclusive upon the other departments, it may be answered, that this cannot be the natural presumption, where it is not to be collected from any particular provisions in the constitution. The interpretation of the laws is the proper and peculiar province of the courts. A constitution is, in fact, and must be, regarded by the judges as a fundamental law. It must therefore belong to them to ascertain its meaning, as well as the meaning of any particular act proceeding from the legislative body. If there should happen to be an irreconcilable variance between the two, that which has the superior obligation and validity ought, of course, to be preferred; in other words, the constitution ought to be preferred to the statute. Nor does the conclusion by any means suppose a superiority of the judicial to the legislative power. It only supposes that the power of the people is superior to both; and that where the