Either of these results would
impair public confidence in the perfection of the system and lead to
serious alterations of its framework or to the practical abandonment of
some of its provisions.
The influence of such proceedings on the other departments of the
Government, and more especially on the States, could not fail to be
extensively pernicious. When the judges in the last resort of official
misconduct themselves overleap the bounds of their authority as
prescribed by the Constitution, what general disregard of its provisions
might not their example be expected to produce? And who does not
perceive that such contempt of the Federal Constitution by one of its
most important departments would hold out the strongest temptations to
resistance on the part of the State sovereignties whenever they shall
suppose their just rights to have been invaded? Thus all the independent
departments of the Government, and the States which compose our
confederated Union, instead of attending to their appropriate duties and
leaving those who may offend to be reclaimed or punished in the manner
pointed out in the Constitution, would fall to mutual crimination and
recrimination and give to the people confusion and anarchy instead of
order and law, until at length some form of aristocratic power would be
established on the ruins of the Constitution or the States be broken
into separate communities.
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