those authorities may have attempted. In point of fact, there have been few cases, and those chiefly cases of urgency during the war, in which the judiciary has been even accused of lending itself to the designs of the other organs of government. The period when extensive interpretation was most active (1800-1835) was also the period when the party opposed to a strong central government commanded Congress and the executive, and so far from approving the course the court took, the dominant party then often complained of it.
In the second place, there stands above and behind the legislature, the executive, and the judiciary, another power, that of public opinion. The President, Congress, and the courts are all, the two former directly, the latter practically, amenable to the people, and anxious to be in harmony with the general current of its sentiment. If the people approve the way in which these authorities are interpreting and using the Constitution, they go on; if the people disapprove, they pause, or at least slacken their pace. Generally the people have approved of such action by the President or Congress as has seemed justified by the needs of the time, even though it may have gone beyond the letter of the Constitution: generally they have approved the conduct of the courts whose legal interpretation has upheld such legislative or executive action. Public opinion sanctioned the purchase of Louisiana, and the still bolder action of the executive in the Secession War. It approved the Missouri compromise of 1820, which the Supreme court thirty-seven years afterwards declared to have been in excess of the powers of Congress. But it disapproved the Alien and Sedition laws of 1798, and although these statutes were never pronounced unconstitutional by the courts, this popular censure has prevented any similar legislation since that time.[1] The people have, of course, much less exact notions of the Constitution than the legal profession or the courts. But while they generally desire to see the powers of the government so far expanded as to enable it to meet the exigencies of the moment, they are sufficiently attached to its general doctrines, they sufficiently prize the protection it affords them against their own impulses, to censure any interpretation
- ↑ So it disapproved strongly, in the northern States, of the judgments delivered by the majority of the Supreme court in the Dred Scott case.
