Government.
Those who oppose the rash and violent measures of the Executive... are
generally the bitter enemies of Constitutional Government. Many of them
are the avowed advocates of a league; and those who do not go the
whole length, go a great part of the way. What can we hope for in such
circumstances?"

Yet there was one respect in which the significance of Marshall's
achievement must have been as clear to himself as it was to his
contemporaries. He had failed for the time being to establish his
definition of national power, it is true, but he had made the Supreme
Court one of the great political forces of the country. The very
ferocity with which the pretensions of the Court were assailed in
certain quarters was indirect proof of its power, but there was also
direct testimony of a high order. In 1830 Alexis de Tocqueville, the
French statesman, visited the United States just as the rough frontier
democracy was coming into its own. Only through the Supreme Court, in
his opinion, were the forces of renewal and growth thus liberated to
be kept within the bounds set by existing institutions. "The peace, the
prosperity, and the very existence of the Union," he wrote, "are vested
in the hands of the seven Federal judges. Without them the Constitution
would be a dead letter: the Executive appeals to them for assistance
against the encroachments of the legislative power; the Legislature
demands their protection against the assaults of the Executive; they
defend the Union from the disobedience of the States, the States from
the exaggerated claims of the Union, the public interest against
private interests and the conservative spirit of stability against the
fickleness of the democracy." The contrast between these observations
and the disheartened words in which Jay declined renomination to the
chief justiceship in 1801 gives perhaps a fair measure of Marshall's
accomplishment.

Of the implications of the accomplishment of the great Chief Justice
for the political life of the country, let De Tocqueville speak again:
"Scarcely any political question arises in the United States which
is not resolved sooner, or later, into a judicial question. Hence all
parties are obliged to borrow in their daily controversies the ideas,
and even the language peculiar to judicial proceedings.... The language
of the law thus becomes, in some measure, a vulgar tongue; the spirit of
law, which is produced in the schools and courts of justice, g