Feb. 9, 1805, the case was opened by John Randolph. Randolph claimed to have drawn all the articles of impeachment with his own hand. If any one understood their character, it was he; and the respondent’s counsel naturally listened with interest for Randolph’s explanation or theory of impeachment, and for the connection he should establish between his theory and his charges. These charges were numerous, but fell under few heads. Of the eight articles which Randolph presented, the first concerned the judge’s conduct at the trial of John Fries for treason in Philadelphia in 1800; the five following articles alleged a number of offences committed during the trial of James Thompson Callender for libel at Richmond in that year; Article VII. charged as a misdemeanor the judge’s refusal, in the same year, to dismiss the grand jury in Delaware before indicting a seditious printer; finally, Article VIII. complained of the judge’s harangue to the grand jury at Baltimore in May, 1803, which it characterized as “highly indecent, extrajudicial, and tending to prostitute the high judicial character with which he was invested to the low purpose of an electioneering partisan.” Serious as some of these charges certainly were,--for in the case of Callender, even more than in that of Fries, Chase’s temper had led him to strain, if not to violate, the law,--none of the articles alleged an offence known to the statute-books or the common law; and Randolph’s first task was to show that they could be made the subject of impeachment, that they were high crimes and misdemeanors in the sense of the Constitution, or that in some sense they were impeachable. Instead of arguing this point, he contented himself by declaring the theory of the defence to be monstrous. His speech touched the articles, one by one, adding little to their force, but piling one mistake on another in its assertions of fact and assumptions of law. Ten days passed in taking evidence before the field was cleared and the discussion began. Then, Feb. 20, 1805, Early and Campbell led for the managers in arguments which followed more or less closely in Randolph’s steps, inferring criminality in the accused from the manifest tenor of his acts. Campbell ventured to add that he was not obliged to prove the accused to have committed any crime known to the law,--it was enough that he had transgressed the line of official duty with corrupt motives; but this timid incursion into the field of the Constitution was supported by no attempt at argument. “I lay it down as a settled rule of decision,” said he, “that when a man violates a law or commits a manifest breach of his duty, an evil intent or corrupt motive must be presumed to have actuated his conduct.”