A majority held in restraint by constitutional checks and limitations,
and always changing easily with deliberate changes of popular opinions
and sentiments, is the only true sovereign of a free people. Whoever
rejects it does, of necessity, fly to anarchy or to despotism.
Unanimity is impossible; the rule of a minority, as a permanent
arrangement, is wholly inadmissible; so that, rejecting the majority
principle, anarchy or despotism in some form is all that is left.
I do not forget the position, assumed by some, that constitutional
questions are to be decided by the Supreme Court; nor do I deny that
such decisions must be binding, in any case, upon the parties to a
suit, as to the object of that suit, while they are also entitled to
very high respect and consideration in all parallel cases by all other
departments of the Government. And while it is obviously possible that
such decision may be erroneous in any given case, still the evil
effect following it, being limited to that particular case, with the
chance that it may be overruled and never become a precedent for other
cases, can better be borne than could the evils of a different
practice. At the same time, the candid citizen must confess that if
the policy of the Government, upon vital questions affecting the whole
people, is to be irrevocably fixed by decisions of the Supreme
Court, the instant they are made, in ordinary litigation between
parties in personal actions, the people will have ceased to be their
own rulers, having to that extent practically resigned their
government into the hands of that eminent tribunal.
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