received opinion” that “no suit” can be commenced or prosecuted against the United States. By saying that this is “the universally received opinion,” I infer that that matter has never been solemnly decided by the supreme court. On general principles I am clearly of opinion that such suits would lie. The objection only, is that a state cannot be sued in the courts of a foreign power. There is no objection to their being sued in their own courts. We are told by Vattel (12) that all just governments ought to appoint impartial judges, and that in all free and well-regulated states, the ordinary tribunals decide the cause in which the sovereign is concerned with as much freedom as those between private persons. Instead therefore of grinding the states to dust and ashes, and impairing their sovereignty by “dragging” (13) them before the federal courts, in the teeth both of great principles, and of the eleventh amendment, these judges should extend the golden principle I have just stated, so as to make the United States amenable to justice. They should extend the principle on which they have, without any legislative act upon the subject, already acted upon the United States, as they say by means of a writ of error, to other actions also While there is nothing in the sovereignty or dignity of the United States, which forbids their own judges from passing upon them, they would be sufficiently shielded from unjust judgment by the check on the subject of appropriations provided by the constitution.
The court in concluding its opinion on this part of the subject, is equally politic and uncandid, as in the others. It would again insinuate that the sole purpose of the writ of
