The thorough and minute consideration bestowed on its numerous details, the well sustained consistency of the argument with the principles upon which it was founded, the felicity and clearness with which its author's views were expressed, and the evidence it furnished of well directed and comprehensive research, stamp this remarkable document as the ablest state paper that proceeded from his pen during the whole of his political career. But able as it was, it yet, as we shall see when we recur to the action of parties, contributed more than all that he had before done to the prostration of the political standing of its author and to the overthrow of his party. Its bold assumptions of power and the jubilant spirit in which they were expressed afforded the clearest indications, as well to his opponents as to the country, that he regarded his victory over the Constitution as complete. He spoke of the national legislature, unhesitatingly and as one having authority, as possessing, in virtue of the construction of the Constitution he had established, all the power with very limited exceptions which he insisted in the Convention ought to be given to it. Mr. Jefferson denounced the recommendations of the report to President Washington with great warmth and earnestness. He described it as going far beyond any pretensions to power under the Constitution which had yet been set up, and as a document to which many eyes were turned as one which was to let us know whether we lived under a limited or an unlimited government.[21] [21] 4 Jefferson's _Correspondence_, p. 457.