Court; which alone can interpret the constitution, is a mere form which has no practical effect.  The history of the United States is on this point decisive.  De Tocqueville, Story, and Kent are far safer and better instructed guides than authors who “cannot conceive how any conflict of authority could arise which could not be easily settled by argument, by conference, by gradual experience;” and who seem to hold that to deny the existence of a difficulty is the same thing as providing for its removal The following are a few of the instances in which the American judiciary have in fact determined the limits which bound the powers, either of Congress or of the State legislatures.  The judiciary have ruled that a State is liable to be sued in the Federal Courts; that Congress has authority to incorporate a bank; that a tax imposed by Congress was an indirect tax, and therefore valid; that the control of the militia really and truly belongs to Congress, and not, as in effect contended by Connecticut and Massachusetts, to the governors of the separate States.  The Federal judiciary have determined the limits to their own jurisdiction and to that of the State Courts.  The judiciary have pronounced one law after another invalid, as contrary to some article of the constitution—­e.g., either by being tainted with the vice of ex post facto legislation, or by impairing the obligation of contracts.  These are a few samples of the mode in which a Federal Court limits all legislative authority.  If any one wishes to see the extent to which the power of such a Court has gone in fact, he should study the decisions on the Legal Tender Act, which all but overset or nullified the financial legislation of Congress during the War of Secession.  If he wishes to see the effect of applying the constitution of the United States, or anything like that constitution, to Great Britain and Ireland, he should consider what is implied in the undoubted fact that the Land Act of 1870 and the Land Act of 1881 would, whether passed by the central or by any local legislature under such a constitution, be at once treated as void, as impairing the obligation of contracts.  If I am told that we might adopt Federalism without adopting the details of the American constitution, my reply is, not only that the remark comes awkwardly from innovators who wish to place Ireland in the position of Massachusetts, but that the very gist of my argument is that the existence of some arbiter (whether it be named Crown, Council, or Court), who may decide whether the constitution has or has not been violated, is of the essence of Federalism, while the existence of such an arbiter absolutely destroys the sovereignty of Parliament.  Nor do the inferences to be drawn from the action of the Federal Court, and a study of the American constitution as it actually exists, end here.  In the decisions of the Court we may trace the rise of question after question—­that is, of conflict after conflict—­as to the respective