made it virtually law, and law a thousandfold more binding than any Constitutional insertion.
COURTS AND CONSTITUTION.
The trading class had already learned the importance of the principle that while it was essential to control law-making bodies, it was imperative to have as their auxiliary the bodies that interpreted law. To a large extent the United States since then has lived not under legislative-made law, but under a purely separate and extraneous form of law which has superseded the legislature product, namely, court law. Although nowhere in the United States Constitution is there even the suggestion that courts shall make law, yet this past century and more they have been gradually building up a formidable code of interpretations which substantially ranks as the most commanding kind of law. And these interpretations have, on the whole, consistently followed, and kept pace with, the changing interests of the dominant class, whether traders, slaveholders, or the present trusts.
This decision of the august courts opened the way for the greatest orgy of corruption and the most stupendous frauds. In New York, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland, and other States a continuous rush to get bank charters ensued. Most of the legislatures were composed of men who, while perhaps, not innately corrupt, were easily seduced by the corrupt temptations held out by the traders. There was a deep-seated hostility, in many parts of the country, on the part of the middling tradesmen—the shopkeepers and the petty merchants—to any laws calculated to increase the power and the privileges of the superior traders and the landowners. Among the masses of workers, most of whom were, however, disfranchised, any attempt to vest the rich with new privileges, was received with the bitterest resentment. But the legislatures were approachable; some members who were put there by the rich families needed only the word as to how they should vote, while