At this point, in different fashion, Virginia spoke again, this time by the voice of that great protagonist of Localism, John Taylor of Caroline, the originator of the Kentucky Resolutions,[928] and the most brilliant mind in the Republican organization of the Old Dominion. Immediately after Marshall's opinion in M'Culloch vs. Maryland, and while the Ohio conflict was in progress, he wrote a book in denunciation and refutation of Marshall's Nationalist principles. The editorial by Thomas Ritchie, commending Taylor's book, declares that "the crisis has come"; the Missouri question, the Tariff question, the Bank question, have brought the country to the point where a decision must be made as to whether the National Government shall be permitted to go on with its usurpations. "If there is any book capable of arousing the people, it is the one before us."
Taylor gave to his volume the title "Construction Construed, and Constitutions Vindicated." The phrases "exclusive interests" and "exclusive privileges" abound throughout the volume. Sixteen chapters compose this classic of State Rights philosophy. Five of them are devoted to Marshall's opinion in M'Culloch vs. Maryland; the others to theories of government, the state of the country, the protective tariff, and the Missouri question. The principles of the Revolution, avows Taylor, "are the keys of construction" and "the locks of liberty.[929]... No form of government can foster a fanaticism for wealth, without being corrupted." Yet Marshall's ideas establish "the despotick principle of a gratuitous distribution of wealth and poverty by law."[930]
If the theory that Congress can create corporations should prevail, "legislatures will become colleges for teaching the science of getting money by monopolies or favours."[931] To pretend faith in Christianity, and yet foster monopoly, is "like placing Christ on the car of Juggernaut."[932] The framers of the National Constitution tried to prevent the evils of monopoly and avarice by "restricting the powers given to Congress" and safeguarding those of the States; "in fact, by securing the freedom of property."[933]
Marshall is enamored of the word "sovereignty," an "equivocal and illimitable word," not found in "the declaration of independence, nor the federal constitution, nor the constitution of any single state"; all of them repudiated it "as a traitor of civil rights."[934] Well that they had so rejected this term of despotism! No wonder Jugurtha exclaimed, "Rome was for sale," when "the government exercised an absolute power over the national property." Of course it would "find purchasers."[935] To this condition Marshall's theories will bring America.
JOHN TAYLOR
Whence this effort to endow the National Government with powers comparable to those of a monarchy? Plainly it is a reaction—"many wise and good men, ... alarmed by the illusions of Rousseau and Godwin, and the atrocities of the French revolution, honestly believe that these [democratic] principles have teeth and claws, which it is expedient to draw and pare, however constitutional they may be; without considering that such an operation will subject the generous lion to the wily fox; ... subject liberty and property to tyranny and fraud."[936]
In chapter after chapter of clever arguments, illumined by the sparkle of such false gems as these quotations, Taylor prepares the public mind for his direct attack on John Marshall. He is at a sad disadvantage; he, "an unknown writer," can offer only "an artless course of reasoning" against the "acute argument" of Marshall's opinion, concurred in by the members of the Supreme Court whose "talents," "integrity," "uprightness," and "erudition" are universally admitted.[937] The essence of Marshall's doctrine is that, although the powers of the National Government are limited, the means by which they may be executed are unlimited. But, "as ends may be made to beget means, so means may be made to beget ends, until the co-habitation shall rear a progeny of unconstitutional bastards, which were not begotten by the people."[938]
Marshall had said that "'the creation of a corporation appertains to sovereignty.'" This is the language of tyranny. The corporate idea crept into British law "wherein it hides the heart of a prostitute under the habiliments of a virgin."[939] But since, in America, only the people are "sovereign," and, to use Marshall's own words, the power to create corporations "appertains to sovereignty," it follows that neither State nor National Governments can create corporations.[940]
The Chief Justice is a master of the "science of verbality" by which the Constitution may be rendered "as unintelligible, as a single word would be made by a syllabick dislocation, or a jumble of its letters; and turn it into a reservoir of every meaning for which its expounder may have occasion."