of Governor Herbert R. O'Conor 435

Virginia Plan, by making the court a member of the legislative department,
did not provide for proper "checks and balances" which he and his colleagues
considered essential to the preservation of our liberties.

It has been said, and rightly so, that the present Constitution would never
have been evolved from its labors, had it not been for the leadership of Luther
Martin. In that time of great crisis a lawyer arose in this Country keen enough
to note the fallacy of the Virginia Plan and to offer an acceptable substitute,
one which has worn with time and outlived other forms of government through-
out the world. We are proud that America possessed such a legal mind as
Martin's at such a moment; we are prouder still that he was of our own Mary-
land Bar and at the time the Attorney General of our State.

Reviewing the history of our Constitution from the vantage point of this
rostrum in the summer of 1941, there have been great crises in the life of our
Constitution. In each of these, great lawyers faced each other in deadly combat
over interpretation of that document.

The first of these occurred in 1801 and the years that followed, when Jeffer-
son in the White House faced Marshall in the Supreme Court. These titans, each
with his own idea of the political development of the Country under constitu-
tional government, wrestled back and forth for years, but it is undeniable that
their struggle represented the first real test of the strength of our Constitution.

Again, during the Civil War, Lincoln in the White House faced Chief
Justice Taney in the Supreme Court. Their battles over the suspension of the
Writ of Habeas Corpus and other questions arising at the time constituted
perhaps the direct threat to the life of our prized parchment.

Having mentioned Chief Justice Roger Brooke Taney as an active partici-
pant in one of these constitutional crises, it would indeed be inappropriate to
pass on without reference to this Marylander who sat in simple dignity upon the
Supreme Court through twenty-eight turbulent years.

He, too, was Attorney General of Maryland and he once stated that,
of all offices open to him in the State and Nation, that was the only one he
desired to hold.

Succeeding Chief Justice Marshall, who had established the strength of the
Court, it was Taney's fortune to deal with graver problems of national security
than ever faced Marshall. When President Lincoln suspended the Writ of
Habeas Corpus in the famous Merryman Case, which originated in Baltimore,
he defied the authority of the Supreme Court.

Maryland lawyers may take justifiable pride in the fact that during that
greatest crisis in the life of our constitutional government the man upholding
the Constitution against even the President himself was a member of our own
Maryland Bar.

Undoubtedly one of the basic reasons for the survival of our constitutional
form of government, over a period when so many others systems of government
were being discarded, lies in the coordination of the separate agencies of gov-
ernment. This was envisioned by the founders of the Nation and has been
carried out with remarkable fidelity throughout the 154 years of our constitu-
tional existence.