3. The Constitution was further designed, as near as may be, “for immortality,” and hence was to be “adapted to the various crises of human affairs,” to be kept a commodious vehicle of the national life and not made the Procrustean bed of the nation.
4. While the government which the Constitution established is one of enumerated powers, as to those powers it is a sovereign government, both in its choice of the means by which to exercise its powers and in its supremacy over all colliding or antagonistic powers.
5. The power of Congress to regulate commerce is an exclusive power, so that the States may not intrude upon this field even though Congress has not acted.
6. The National Government and its instrumentalities are present within the States, not by the tolerance of the States, but by the supreme authority of the people of the United States. ¹
¹ For the application of Marshall’s canons of constitutional interpretation in the field of treaty making, see the writer’s National Supremacy (N. Y., 1913). Chaps. III and IV.
Of these several principles, the first is obviously the most important and to a great extent the source of the others. It is the principle of which Marshall, in face of the rising tide of State Rights, felt himself to be in a peculiar sense the official custodian. It is the principle which he had in mind in his noble plea at the close of the case of Gibbons vs. Ogden for a construction of the Constitution capable of maintaining its vitality and usefulness:
Powerful and ingenious minds [run his words], taking as postulates that the powers expressly granted to the Government of the Union are to be contracted by construction into the narrowest possible compass and that the original powers of the States are to be retained if any possible construction will retain them, may by a course of refined and metaphysical reasoning … explain away the Constitution of our country and leave it a magnificent structure indeed to look at, but totally unfit for use. They may so entangle and perplex the understanding as to obscure principles which were before thought quite plain, and induce doubts where, if the mind were to pursue its own course, none would be perceived. In such a case, it is peculiarly necessary to recur to safe and fundamental principles.