Had Jefferson overlooked the danger, costly as the oversight was, it might cause no surprise; but he perceived it clearly, and in private denounced it with as much keenness as though he already knew what was to be judged “necessary and proper” for the purposes of a government which, as Virginians foresaw, would in the end interpret its own powers. “They have retired into the Judiciary as a stronghold,” cried he in the same breath with which he talked to Congress only of economy.[55] “There the remains of federalism are to be preserved and fed from the Treasury; and from that battery all the works of republicanism are to be beaten down and destroyed.” Some twenty years afterward Jefferson awoke to see his prophecy come true, and he then threw responsibility on the Constitution. “The nation declared its will,” he said,[56] “by dismissing functionaries of one principle and electing those of another in the two branches, executive and legislative, submitted to their election. Over the judiciary department the Constitution had deprived them of their control. That, therefore, has continued the reprobated system; and although new matter has occasionally been incorporated into the old, yet the leaven of the old mass seems to assimilate to itself the new; and after twenty years’ confirmation of the federated system by the voice of the nation, declared through the medium of elections, we find the Judiciary, on every occasion, still driving us into consolidation.” Such was the fact; and when Jefferson spoke of “the leaven of the old mass,” he meant Chief-Justice Marshall, who had won a slow, certain victory over State-rights, and had thrust powers on the national government which, if Jefferson were right, must end in corrupting and destroying it. Whose was the fault? Was it true that the Constitution deprived the people of their control over the Judiciary? Even if it were so, did not Jefferson for years control with autocratic power the strength necessary for altering the Constitution? When at last, four years before his death, the impending certainty of defeat forced itself on Jefferson’s mind, he made what amounted to a confession of his oversight, and withdrew the apology which threw blame on the Constitution: “Before the canker is become inveterate,--before its venom has reached so much of the body politic as to get beyond control,--remedy should be applied. Let the future appointments of judges be for four or six years, and renewable by the President and Senate.”[57] If this could be done, as his words implied, in 1822 under the Presidency of James Monroe, when J. Q. Adams, Calhoun, Clay, and Andrew Jackson were each in his own way laboring to consolidate a nation still hot with the enthusiasm of foreign war, why was it not attempted in 1801, when a word from Jefferson would have decided the action of his party?