The charter of a
college is that which constitutes its endowment private property. The
Supreme Court accepted these two propositions, and thus secured to
every college in the country its right to its endowment. This seems
too simple for argument, but it cost a prodigious and powerfully
contested lawsuit to reduce the question to this simplicity; and it
was Webster's large, calm, and discriminating glance which detected
these two fundamental truths in the mountain mass of testimony,
argument, and judicial decision. In arguing the great steamboat case,
too, he displayed the same qualities of mind. New York having granted
to Livingston and Fulton the exclusive right to navigate her waters by
steamboats, certain citizens of New Jersey objected, and, after a
fierce struggle upon the waters themselves, transferred the contest to
the Supreme Court. Mr. Webster said: "The commerce of the United
States, under the Constitution of 1787, is a unit," and "what we call
the waters of the State of New York are, for the purposes of
navigation and commerce, the waters of the United States"; therefore
no State can grant exclusive privileges.
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