At this point, more perhaps than at any other of our history, a definite, accurate, and comprehensive inventory of conditions is essential.
Albert Beveridge
The Public Record
Albert Jeremiah Beveridge was an American historian and United States senator from Indiana. He was an intellectual leader of the Progressive Era and a biographer of Chief Justice John Marshall and President Abraham Lincoln.
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One idea and one alone possessed this type--the idea of independence, freedom from restraint.
Above all, everybody knew that government meant taxes.
Bloated and monstrous individualism grew out of the dank soil of these conditions.
What could be easier or more just than to enact legislation that would lift the burden of debt that was crushing the people?
So came a popular determination to exterminate, by State action, the second Bank of the United States.
National power should be brought to its knees by local authority!
But he could establish great National principles, which would give steadiness to American business, vitality to the National Government; and which would encourage the people to practice honesty, prudence, and thrift.
He was against imprisonment for debt, one of the many brutal customs still practiced.
To punish honest insolvency by imprisonment for life, and to make this a constitutional principle, would be an excess of inhumanity which will not readily be imputed to the illustrious patriots who framed our constitution, nor to the…
The convention appears to have intended to establish a great principle, that contracts should be inviolable.
Gradually, surely, Marshall's simple doctrine grew in favor throughout the whole country, and is to-day a vital and enduring element of American thought and character as well as of Constitutional law.
Thus did he develop the idea of good faith and stability of engagement as a life-giving principle of the American Constitution.
By far the strongest objection to a National bank, however, was that it was a monopoly inconsistent with free institutions.
Shall we tamely act under the lash of this tyranny of the press?...
Thus Europe, and especially the United Kingdom, conceived for Americans that profound contempt which was to endure for generations.
He must not ... allow himself to be dazzled by that galaxy of epithets by which his orators and newspaper scribblers endeavour to persuade their supporters that they are the greatest, the most refined, the most enlightened, and the most…
Such a contract, in relation to a publick institution would be absurd and contrary to the principles of all governments. (Chief Justice William M.
Both were avowals that State Legislatures cannot, on any pretext, overthrow agreements, whether in the form of engagements between individuals or franchises to corporations.
The sacredness of contract, the stability of institutions, and, above all, Nationalism in government, were, to John Marshall, articles of a creed as holy as any that ever inspired a religious enthusiast.
In a brief opinion, in which it is worthy of particular note that the Supreme Court was unanimous, Marshall says that the Constitution protects "contracts to which a state is a party, as well as ... contracts between individuals....
The king had no power to make such a contract," and neither has the Legislature.
His main point was that, if chartered rights could be interfered with at all, such action was inherently beyond the power of the Legislature, and belonged exclusively to the Judiciary.
High as such authority is, one still more exalted and final has spoken, and upon the precise point now in controversy.
Every college, and all the literary institutions of the country" are imperiled.
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