Helena Weekly Herald

IMPORTANT DECISION.

At the same time with the legal tender decision the Supreme Court rendered another quite as important, sustaining the right of the general government to legislate for the protection of the purity of the ballot. Justice Miller, rendering the judgment of the court, says: "If this government is anything more than a mere aggregation of delegated agents of other States and governments, each of which is superior to the general government, it would have power to protect an election on which its existence depends from violence and corruption. If it has not that power, it is left helpless before the two great natural and historical enemies of all republics--open violence and insidious corruption."

And the court, through Justice Miller, overthrows completely the old Democratic State's rights doctrine that the constitution gives the general government no implied powers. Of this strict construction theory he says: "It destroys at one blow, in construing the constitution of the United States the doctrine universally applied to all instruments in writing, that what is implied is as much a part of the instrument as what is expressed." Though this power has not been exercised heretofore, it has not been lost or forfeited. He further says: "It is only because the Congress of the United States through long habit and long years of forbearance has in deference and respect to the States refrained from the exercise of these powers that they are now doubted."

It has taken long, weary and bloody years to root this baneful, pestilential heresy from the supreme judicial breast. We are now fully entitled to write the word Nation with a big N. We call to mind the painfully pusillanimous position of Buchanan with all the din of defiant secession ringing in his ears, saying in despair that he could find no powers in the constitution for the general government to coerce a State. The instinct of Jackson was fully expressive of the spirit of the constitution when he notified the South Carolina nullifiers that they should obey the laws or swing for it.

We finally have what our fathers intended, a government with full powers to protect itself, and in doing so, to protect the existence and welfare of the States. The States may have existed before the Nation, but experience has shown that they can only exist through it. We have now fully and fairly emerged from that narrow existence, so weak and humiliating, which made the State the chief unit and factor of our system. It is of more account that one can say he is a citizen of the United States than merely a citizen of a single State. As time moves on and our nation grows, this significance will be more and more emphatic.