removable by the President upon the application of the Senate and
House of Representatives was proposed late in the Convention by
Dickinson of Delaware, but the suggestion received the vote of
only one State. In the end it was all but unanimously agreed that
the Federal judges should be removable only upon conviction
following impeachment.

But, while the Convention was in accord on this matter, another
question, that of the organization of the new judiciary, evoked
the sharpest disagreement among its members. All believed that
there must be a national Supreme Court to impress upon the
national statutes a construction that should be uniformly binding
throughout the country; but they disagreed upon the question
whether there should be inferior national courts. Rutledge of
South Carolina wanted the state courts to be used as national
courts of the first instance and argued that a right of appeal to
the supreme national tribunal would be quite sufficient "to
secure the national rights and uniformity of judgment." But
Madison pointed out that such an arrangement would cause appeals
to be multiplied most oppressively and that, furthermore, it
would provide no remedy for improper verdicts resulting from
local prejudices. A compromise was reached by leaving the
question to the discretion of Congress. The champions of local
liberties, however, both at Philadelphia and in the state
conventions continued to the end to urge that Congress should
utilize the state courts as national tribunals of the first
instance. The significance of this plea should be emphasized
because the time was to come when the same interest would argue
that for the Supreme Court to take appeals from the state courts
on any account was a humiliation to the latter and an utter