These words of Chief Justice Marshall in Marbury v. Madison, 1 Cranch, 137, are the most significant and far reaching in their effect upon human government that were ever uttered by the lips of man.
"A government of laws and not of men." This expresses the fundamental difference between the government of this great American republic and all other systems of government devised by man before the Constitution of the United States came into being.(113)
Government has been the great problem of the human race throughout all the ages since mankind first started out upon the great highway of life. The greatest problem men have ever been called upon to solve is "how they might live together in communities without cutting each others throats".
As we look back at the warring world of yesterday, yea as we look at the warring world to-day (1920), we are reminded that the history of the human family tells a long, sad story of war and bloodshed and death. The path which humanity has traveled stretches back into the dim distance, a long gleaming line of white human bones. The flowers, the trees, and the shrubs along the way have been nurtured by the red blood that flowed from human hearts. All over the world the battle has waged; away down in Egypt where the Nile scatters her riches; upon the banks of the Tiber which for centuries has reflected the majesty of Rome; upon the heights above the castle crowned Rhine; on the banks of the peaceful Thames; and upon the prairies that sweep back from the Father of Waters, men have fought and died. In the field and in the forest, by the sweet running brook, and upon the burning sands, in the mountain pass, and in the stony streets of the populous city, within the chancel rail of holy churches, and at the dark entrance to the Bastile--in all these places, and in a thousand more, the hand of the oppressed has been lifted against the oppressor, the right to be free that God gave to men has struggled with the power which might has given, and, alas! so often might has triumphed, and the slave, sick at heart, has been scourged to his dungeon. On a thousand hillsides burning fagots have consumed men who dared to dream of freedom, and in dark and slimy prison cells where God's sunlight seldom entered, men have rotten with clanking chains upon their limbs because they dared to ask for the rights of freemen.