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States, when a federal judge stands ready to unlock the jail or penitentiary and discharge him at any stage of the proceedings? Am I not justified, then, in asserting that the inferior federal courts have, by the use of the writ of habeas corpus, at once asserted a final appellate jurisdiction over the courts of the states, within the limits prescribed by their own views of the law, and at the same time absorbed an essential portion of the appellate jurisdiction of the Supreme Court of the United States? Was it ever intended by those who formed our federal system that the final decision of the gravest questions of constitutional law affecting the sovereign rights of the states should be committed to the inferior federal courts? On the contrary, did not the Constitution create one court to whose jurisdiction the final decision of such questions was to be committed?

The duty of supplying a remedy for this extraordinary state of things rests with Congress. Whenever a case has passed to judgment in a state tribunal, if the defendant thinks he is imprisoned contrary to the Constitution of the United States, to an act of Congress, or to a public treaty, he should be put to his appeal to the highest court of his state in which the question is examinable, and then to a writ of error to the Supreme Court of the United States. If these processes are thought too slow to vindicate the right of personal liberty, the least that Congress "can do is to provide a mode by which the decisions of the federal circuit and district courts may be re-examined in the Supreme Court of the United States. Such an appellate proceeding need not operate as a supersedeas of the judgment of the federal court; it need not bar the prisoner of his right to an immediate release, if that be his right; but the state whose laws or constitutional ordinances are thus overturned, should be allowed in some way to bring the questions of their validity to the arbitrament court appointed by the Constitution for the final settlement of such questions.

ANNUAL ADDRESS

BY

JOHN W. STEVENSON.

JAMES MADISON.

Gentlemen of the American Bar Association,-The wisdom of our fathers has vouchsafed to us a constitution of government marvelous in its conception, most beneficent in its results.

The century has not yet closed within which thirteen independent sovereign states, weakened and worn down by. a protracted and bloody revolutionary struggle for their independence against the arbitrary oppression of their mother country; embarrassed with debt; overwhelmed with a depreciated and almost worthless paper currency; with limited powers; and at a period (it has been said) the most critical, if not the most fearful, in the history of the human race, being that preceding the early French Revolution,-formed and ratified the Constitution of the United States, creating thereby the union of the states under a compound form of constitutional self-government, the constitution enumerating all the powers delegated to the new government, reserving all others to the states or to the people.

The far-seeing founders of this experimental system of government, versed as they were in the former failure of popular efforts in that direction, not less than thoroughly conversant with the character, circumstances, and genius of the people whose organs they were in that great work, sought to found a free republic in which the people were

the source of all sovereign power, empowered to administer the government through certain delegated agencies, to each of which was assigned and marked out certain well-defined orbits of action, prescribed in the Constitution, declared to be the supreme law, binding personally upon the people and their agents, and so to remain until changed by a like solemn and authentic act of the public will, in manner and form prescribed therein.

It was under such a government, with its mutual checks and balances, its barriers against every assumption of arbitrary, unlicensed power-from within or from without; from one, from the few, or the many-and especially by a just and proper distribution of the federal power with the local systems of the states, that its authors foresaw the highest guarantee for public order, peace, and individual liberty. To-day, as we look back on the faith and courage of these founders of our government, after the experience of ninetysix years of their work, what American heart is not lifted up in thankfulness to God for his merciful protection, and with grateful wonder at the reach of practical wisdom and farseeing statesmanship displayed in the formation of the Constitution of the United States! Compare, I pray you, the condition of the country then and now.

With a population of three millions when our national existence commenced, we number to-day more than fifty millions of freemen; and that proportionate influx continues annually to increase as the years flow onward. Our boundaries, then not reaching the gulf of Mexico, extend now from Alaska to Mexico, and from the Atlantic to the Pacific

oceans.

Our revolutionary debt has been long since extinguished: our national faith and credit maintained throughout the world; the American flag covering every sea; civil and religious liberty upheld; the rights, claims, and interest of

the people faithfully preserved and fearlessly maintained ; and our republic, the power of freedom and the open foe of all human oppression, stands at this moment in the forefront of the nations of the world.

Such have been some of the triumphs and blessings of the government created by the Constitution of the United States. It has been said by an eminent American statesman, now passed away, that the personal character of our public men—their moral principles, their intellectual qualities and attainments, the circumstances which have contributed to form or develop them in either aspect—become an interesting and attractive subject for historic or professional inquiry, and, by a natural and just relation, often go hand in hand with the great public questions in which they have in former years borne a distinguished part.

Concurring in the justice of this sentiment, I have persuaded myself that a brief notice of the life, public services, and a few personal reminiscences of a prominent actor in the formation-and establishment of the great constitutional compact of government and union which crowned the labors of our revolutionary sages; of one who subsequently became the pure, wise, and able administrator of the government which that Constitution created, might prove to my professional brethren of this Association not wholly an uninteresting topic on which to address them.

I am therefore briefly to speak to you of James Madison, the fourth President of the United States. This illustrious Virginian was born on the 16th day of March, 1751, at the house of his maternal grandmother, Mrs. Eleanor Conway, on the north side of the Rappahannock River, in the county of King George, in the commonwealth of Virginia.

The residence of his parents at that time was in the county of Orange, fifty or sixty miles distant; but his birth

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