hnson, but "the science
of politics was still in its infancy"; and in a republican system of
government its development should be entrusted to those organs which
were responsible to the people. Judges were of no better clay than
other folk. "Why, then," he asked, "should they be considered any more
infallible, or their decisions any less subject to investigation and
revision?" Furthermore, "courts, like cities, and villages, or like
legislative bodies, will sometimes have their leaders; and it may
happen that a single individual will be the prime cause of a decision
to overturn the deliberate act of a whole State or of the United States;
yet we are admonished to receive their opinions as the ancients did the
responses of the Delphic oracle, or the Jews, with more propriety, the
communications from Heaven delivered by Urim and Thummim to the High
Priest of God's chosen people."

*For a good review of the contemporary agitation aroused by
Marshall's decisions, see two articles by Charles Warren in the
"American Law Review," vol. XLVII, pp. 1 and 161.

For several years after this, hardly a session of Congress convened in
which there was not introduced some measure for the purpose either of
curbing the Supreme Court or of curtailing Marshall's influence on its
decisions. One measure, for example, proposed the repeal of Section XXV;
another, the enlargement of the Court from seven to ten judges; another,
the requirement that any decision setting aside a state law must have
the concurrence of five out of seven judges; another, the allowance of
appeals to the Court on decisions adverse to the constitutionality of
state laws as well as on decisions sustaining them. Finally, in January,
1826, a bill enlarging the Court to ten judges passed the House by a
vote of 132 to 27. In the Senate, Rowan of Kentucky moved an amendment
requiring in all cases the concurrence of seven of the proposed ten
judges. In a speech which was typical of current criticism of the Court
he bitterly assailed the judges for the protection they had given the
Bank--that "political juggernaut," that "creature of the perverted
corporate powers of the Federal Government"--and he described the Court
itself as "placed above the control of the will of the people, in a
state of disconnection with them, inaccessible to the charities and
sympathies of human life." The amendment failed, however, and in the end
the bill itself was rejected.

Yet a proposition