August 31 the chief-justice read his decision. Much the longest of Marshall’s judicial opinions; elaborately argued, with many citations, and with less simple adherence to one leading thought than was usual in his logic,--this paper seemed, in the imagination of Marshall’s enemies, to betray a painful effort to reconcile his dictum in Bollman’s case with the exclusion of further evidence in the case of Burr. To laymen, who knew only the uncertainties of law; who thought that the assemblage on Blennerhassett’s island was such an overt act as might, without violent impropriety, be held by a jury to be an act of levying war; and who conceived that Burr, although absent from the spot, was as principal present in a legal sense such as would excuse a jury in finding him guilty,--an uneasy doubt could not fail to suggest itself that the chief-justice, with an equal effort of ingenuity, might have produced equal conviction in a directly opposite result. On the other hand, the intent of the Constitution was clear. The men who framed that instrument remembered the crimes that had been perpetrated under the pretence of justice; for the most part they had been traitors themselves, and having risked their necks under the law they feared despotism and arbitrary power more than they feared treason. No one could doubt that their sympathies, at least in 1788, when the Constitution was framed, would have been on the side of Marshall’s decision. If Jefferson, since 1788, had changed his point of view, the chief-justice was not under obligations to imitate him. “If it be said that the advising or procurement of treason is a secret transaction which can scarcely ever be proved in the manner required by this opinion, the answer which will readily suggest itself is that the difficulty of proving a fact will not justify conviction without proof.” At the close of his decision the chief-justice, with simple dignity which still compels respectful admiration, took up the gauntlet which the district-attorney had flung at his feet. As though turning from the crowd in the court-room to look for a moment directly into the eyes of the President, the threatened chief-justice uttered a few words that were at once answer and defiance:-- “Much has been said in the course of the argument on points on which the Court feels no inclination to comment particularly, but which may perhaps not improperly receive some notice.