Coldly as his ideas were received in the Cabinet, Jefferson did not abandon them. Another month passed, and a call was issued for a special meeting of Congress October 17 to provide the necessary legislation for carrying the treaty into effect. As the summer wore away, Jefferson imparted his opinions to persons outside the Cabinet. He wrote, August 12, to Breckenridge of Kentucky a long and genial letter. Congress, he supposed,[72] after ratifying the treaty and paying for the country, “must then appeal to _the nation_ for an additional article to the Constitution approving and confirming an act which the nation had not previously authorized. The Constitution has made no provision for our holding foreign territory, still less for incorporating foreign nations into our Union. The Executive, in seizing the fugitive occurrence which so much advances the good of their country, have done an act beyond the Constitution. The Legislature, in casting behind them metaphysical subtleties and risking themselves like faithful servants, must ratify and pay for it, and throw themselves on their country for doing for them unauthorized what we know they would have done for themselves had they been in a situation to do it.” Breckenridge--whose Kentucky Resolutions, hardly five years before, declared that unconstitutional assumptions of power were the surrender of the form of government the people had chosen, and the replacing it by a government which derived its powers from its own will--might be annoyed at finding his principles abandoned by the man who had led him to father them; and surely no leader who had sent to his follower in one year the draft of the Kentucky Resolutions could have expected to send in another the draft of the Louisiana treaty. “I suppose they must then appeal to _the nation_” were the President’s words; and he underscored this ominous phrase. “We shall not be disavowed by the nation, and their act of indemnity will confirm and not weaken the Constitution by more strongly marking out its lines.” The Constitution, in dealing with the matter of amendments, made no reference to the nation; the word itself was unknown to the Constitution, which invariably spoke of the _Union_ wherever such an expression was needed; and on the Virginia theory Congress had no right to appeal to the nation at all, except as a nation of States, for an amendment. The language used by Jefferson was the language of centralization, and would have been rejected by him and his party in 1798 or in 1820. On the day of writing to Breckenridge the President wrote in a like sense to Paine; but in the course of a week despatches arrived from Paris which alarmed him. Livingston had reason to fear a sudden change of mind in the First Consul, and was willing to hasten the movements of President and Congress. Jefferson took the alarm, and wrote instantly to warn Breckenridge and Paine that no whisper of constitutional difficulties must be heard:[73]--