The briefest recital of the purpose of these laws is sufficient to prove the folly of the administration that fathered them, and when one considers the possible lengths to which an official, representing the President, might go if instigated by private or party revenge, Edward Livingston's declaration that they "would have disgraced the age of Gothic barbarity" does not seem too strong.[87] Under the Alien Act persons not citizens of the United States could be summarily banished at the sole discretion of the President, without guilt or even accusation, thus jeopardising the liberty and business of the most peaceable and well-disposed foreigner. Under the Act of Sedition a citizen could be dragged from his bed at night and taken hundreds of miles from home to be tried for circulating a petition asking that these laws be repealed. The intended effect was to weed out the foreign-born and crush political opponents, and, the better to accomplish this purpose, the Alien Act set aside trial by jury, and the Sedition Act transferred prosecutions from state courts to federal tribunals. [Footnote 87: "Let us not establish a tyranny," Hamilton wrote Oliver Wolcott.--_Works of_, Vol. 8, p. 491. "Let us not be cruel or violent."--_Ibid._, 490. He thought the Alien Law deficient in guarantees of personal liberty.--_Ibid._, 5, 26.] Governor Jay approved these extreme measures because of alleged secret combinations in the interest of the French; and, although no proof of their existence appeared except in the unsupported statements of the press, he submitted to the Legislature, in January, 1799, several amendments to the Federal Constitution, proposed by Massachusetts, increasing the disability of foreigners, and otherwise limiting their rights to citizenship. The Legislature, still strongly Federal in both its branches, did not take kindly to the amendments, and the Assembly rejected them by the surprising vote of sixty-two to thirty-eight. Then came up the famous Kentucky and Virginia resolutions. The Virginia resolves, drafted by Madison and passed by the Virginia Legislature, pronounced the Alien and Sedition laws "palpable and alarming infractions of the Constitution;" the Kentucky resolutions, drafted by Jefferson, declared each act to be "not law, but altogether void and of no force." This was nullification, and the States north of the Potomac hastened to disavow any such doctrine, although the vote in the New York Assembly came perilously near indorsing it.