accept. This is one of the rights guaranteed to him by our
Declaration of Rights. It is a right of which the legislature
cannot deprive him, one which the law of no trades union can
take from him, and one which it is the bounden duty of the
courts to protect. The one most concerned in jealously
maintaining this freedom is the workman himself.[Footnote:
Erdman _v._ Mitchell, 207 Pennsylvania State Reports, 79;
56 Atlantic Reporter, 331.]

But, as already suggested in the preceding chapter, the judges
whose opinions have vitalized and enlarged our written law by
reading into it some new meaning or application have but echoed
the voice of the bar.

The greatest achievements of Marshall in this direction were
really but a statement of his approbation of positions laid down
before him by Daniel Webster. In the early stages of the
Dartmouth College case, when it was before the State courts in
New Hampshire, it was Webster and his associates, Jeremiah Mason
and Jeremiah Smith, both lawyers of the highest rank, who first
put forward the doctrine that the charter of a private
corporation was a contract; and when the cause came before the
Supreme Court of the United States it fell to the lot of Webster
to bring it to the attention of the great Chief
Justice.[Footnote: "Works of Daniel Webster," V, 497.] So in the
Florida case it was he, in supporting the cause of the prevailing
party, who suggested that the Territory of Florida, though owned
by the United States, was no part of them. "By the law of
England," he went on to say, "when possession is taken of
territories, the king, _Jure Corona_, has the power of