to the
co-States "that each will take measures of its own for providing that
neither these acts nor any others of the general government, not plainly
and intentionally authorized by the Constitution, shall be exercised
within their respective territories." All this must have been known to
Mr. Madison then, if not before. Yet, three years later, in that paper
"On Nullification" which has been mentioned, he wrote: "The amount of
this modified right of nullification is, that a single State may arrest
the operation of a law of the United States.... And this newfangled
theory is attempted to be fathered on Mr. Jefferson, the apostle of
republicanism." It would be charitable here to believe that there was
some lapse of memory in these latter days, and that he had forgotten
that Jefferson was, above all things, his own words being witness, the
apostle of nullification.

The Alien and Sedition Laws--of which the more obnoxious of the former
was never enforced, and the latter expired by limitation in two
years--had their influence in the presidential election of 1800. But it
was due more to differences between the President and some of the
leaders of the Federal party that that party lost its hold upon power,
never to be regained. With the election of Jefferson, Madison entered
upon another sphere of duty, which was politically a promotion, but
where his influence, if it was so large, was not so evident as when an
active leader of his party. It was at Mr. Jefferson's "pressing desire,"
Mr. Madison himself says, in a letter written many years afterward, that
he took the office of secretary of state. In the same letter he explains
that he had declined an executive appointment under Washington, because,
in taking a seat in the House of Representatives, he would be less
exposed to the imputation of selfish views in the part he had taken in
"the origin and adoption of the Constitution;" because there, if
anywhere, he could be of service in sustaining it against its
adversaries, especially as it was, "in its progress, encountering trials
of a new sort in the formation of new parties attaching adverse
constructions to it." The latter reason seems to be one of those happy
after-thoughts which public men not unfrequently flatter themselves will
anticipate a question they would prefer should not be asked. Mr. Madison
was a member of the First Congress from the first day it met, before the
new Constitution had encountered new trials from