HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY. New York: 11 East Seventeenth Street. The Riverside Press, Cambridge. 1885. H. Ar 3879 Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1868, by JOHN NORTON POMEROY, in the Clerk's Office of the District Court for the Southern District of New York. PREFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION. IN preparing the work of which the third edition is now offered to the public, the principal purpose of the author was to furnish for general readers, for colleges, law schools, and other higher seminaries, and for the legal profession, a book adapted to their present wants and based upon the principles of constitutional interpretation which have been settled by the civil war and by the political events that followed it. Although, as the name indicates, it is an Introduction and does not purport to be an absolutely exhaustive treatise, yet all the purely constitutional questions which have at any time been passed upon by the highest national tribunal, are discussed and the results thereof are stated. In respect to some of these topics, where there has been a conflict of opinion between the federal and the state courts, or where the relative powers of the national and state governments have been somewhat undefined and uncertain, the treatment has been designedly made more full and minute. Among the more important of these topics are the powers of taxing and of regulating commerce, the military powers, the executive powers, the rights of citizenship, and state laws impairing the obligation of contracts. The work. is thus intended for use as a text-book by the courts and the bar. In determining the principles which underlie all others, in reference to the nature of the United States as a body politic and of its Constitution, an attempt has been made to construct a harmonious system of interpretation founded, not upon theoretical and a priori speculations, but upon historical facts, which shall at the same time recognize and uphold the nationality and absolute sovereignty of the United States and the supremacy of its government, and also maintain the essential exist |