The Judiciary never admitted the propriety of this reasoning,[317] which was indeed no answer to Marshall’s argument. Unless the President of the United States were raised above the rank of a citizen, and endowed with more than royal prerogatives, no duty could be more imperative upon him than that of lending every aid in his power to the Judiciary in a case which involved the foundations of civil society and government. No Judiciary could assume at the outset that Executive duties would necessarily be interrupted by breaking Jefferson’s long visits to Monticello in order to bring him for a day to Richmond. Consciousness of this possible rejoinder disturbed the President’s mind so much that he undertook to meet it in advance:-- “The Judge says ‘_it is apparent_ that the President’s duties as chief magistrate do not demand his whole time, and are not unremitting.’ If he alludes to our annual retirement from the seat of government during the sickly season, he should be told that such arrangements are made for carrying on the public business, at and between the several stations we take, that it goes on as unremittingly there as if we were at the seat of government.” The district-attorney would hardly have dared tell this to the chief-justice, for he must have felt that Marshall would treat it as an admission. If arrangements could be made for carrying on the public business at Monticello, why could they not be made for carrying it on at Richmond? Perhaps temper had more to do with Jefferson’s reasoning than he imagined. Nothing could be better calculated to nettle a philosophic President who believed the world, except within his own domain, to be too much governed, than the charge that he himself had played the despot and had trampled upon private rights; but that such charges should be pressed with the coarseness of Luther Martin, and should depend on the rulings of John Marshall, seemed an intolerable outrage on the purity of Jefferson’s intentions. In such cases an explosion of anger was a common form of relief. Even President Washington was said to have sometimes dashed his hat upon the ground, and the second President was famous for gusts of temper. “I have heard, indeed,” wrote Jefferson,[318] “that my predecessor sometimes decided things against his Council by dashing and trampling his wig on the floor. This only proves, what you and I knew, that he had a better heart than head.”