provisions designed to maintain a government carried on by officers of
limited powers, all the distinctions between what is permitted to the
national government and what is permitted to the state governments, all
the safeguards of the life, liberty and property of the citizen against
arbitrary power, would cease to bind Congress, and on the same theory they
would cease also to bind the legislatures of the states. Instead of the
constitution being superior to the laws the laws would be superior to
the constitution, and the essential principles of our government would
disappear. More than one hundred years ago, Chief Justice Marshall, in the
great case of Marbury _vs_. Madison, set forth the view upon which our
government has ever since proceeded. He said:

"The powers of the legislature are defined and limited; and that those
limits may not be mistaken or forgotten, the constitution is written.
To what purpose are powers limited, and to what purpose is that limit
committed to writing, if these limits may, at any time, be passed by
those intended to be restrained? The distinction between a government
with limited and unlimited powers is abolished, if those limits do not
confine the persons on whom they are imposed, and if acts prohibited
and acts allowed are of equal obligation. It is a proposition too plain
to be contested, that the constitution controls any legislative act
repugnant to it; or that the legislature may alter the constitution
by an ordinary act.

"Between these alternatives, there is no middle ground. The constitution
is either a superior, paramount law, unchangeable by ordinary means, or
it is on a level with ordinary legislative acts, and, like other acts,
is alterable when the legislature shall please to alter it. If the
former part of the alternative be true, then a legislative act, contrary
to the constitution, is not law: if the latter part be true, then