The course pursued by the State department was by his express direction, and of course upon his responsibility. This he always avowed, and this would have appeared in the report of the case of Marbury and Madison, if the fact had not been designedly and for obvious reasons suppressed. It was to accomplish this object that the statement of the case which accompanies the elaborate opinion of Chief Justice Marshall was made to present an appearance so ambiguous and unlawyer-like. Mr. Madison, it is stated, refused to deliver the commission. On what grounds? That is not stated, only that his explanations were not satisfactory to the relator. If they had been given the fact referred to would have appeared on the face of the record, and would have gone down to posterity as an answer to the reasoning of the opinion. The refusal of the witnesses--clerks in the department--to be sworn or to answer, and the decision of the court that they should be sworn and answer under certain restrictions, and that they were sworn, are all stated with much particularity, but what they said is not stated. Here, again, the fact is suppressed that the commission was retained in the executive department by the orders of the President, who, in the exercise of executive discretion, regarded it as the evidence of an appointment not completed, and which he decided not to complete. But this was only a foretaste of the spirit with which the scheme of the Federal party to raise the judicial department of the Federal Government, not only over the States and their judicatories but over the two other departments of the General Government, was to be met. Two months had not elapsed after the delivery of the opinion of the Chief Justice in Marbury _v._ Madison, before the entire judicial fabric which that party had erected during the last moments of their expiring power, by which twenty-one additional federal judges were appointed, eighteen in the States and three in the District of Columbia, with large salaries and still larger power, to hold their offices virtually for life, was overthrown by the vote of a majority of Congress, a majority more confiding, more harmonious, and better disposed to second and sustain the measures of the executive than any we have ever had.