This measure--the least important effect of which was to relieve the national treasury from the payment of salaries to some twenty-seven or thirty gentlemen, whose services an experience of more than half a century has shown to have been unnecessary--was assailed with unprecedented violence. Gouverneur Morris said it had stricken down the sanctity of the judiciary, and his political associates in Congress denounced it as a gross infraction of the Constitution. He spoke of it with the same vehemence and heat with which he taunted the men who had passed it and their successors, twelve years afterwards, at the federal celebration of the restoration of the Bourbons, when he invited them, by the appellation of the "savage and wild democracy," to see, "though it should blast their eye-balls, royal princes surrounded by loyal subjects!" The attempts of Mr. Morris and his coadjutors to exasperate the public mind against the repeal of the midnight Judiciary Act recoiled upon their party. The only effects they produced were to rivet the convictions of a large majority of the people that they had acted wisely in changing their rulers, and to evoke a determination to sustain the men in power as long as they adhered to the course upon which they had entered. To the Chief Justice, his associates on the bench, and the leaders of the defeated party, this condition of public opinion presented considerations of the gravest import. The court had decided, and their decision was sustained by the latter with perfect unanimity, that the appointment of Marbury had been completed before Mr. Jefferson came into office, that the Secretary of State had therefore no right to withhold his commission, and that he could be compelled to deliver it by _mandamus_, provided only that the proceedings should originate in an inferior court. There was no ground for question in respect to the legality of the appointments of the midnight judges, or their clerks, if the repealing law was unconstitutional, nor of their right to their salaries. This was certainly a question for the judiciary in respect to private rights; and if the courts could compel the one Secretary by _mandamus_ to deliver a commission wrongfully withheld, _a fortiori_ could they compel another to pay salaries undeniably due if the repealing law was unconstitutional. The field for the writ of _mandamus_ was thus greatly enlarged. If the withholding of a few justices' commissions constituted good ground for the institution of such proceedings as those we have referred to, the case now presented was one of much greater magnitude, and no party was ever more deeply committed before the country on a public question than they were in regard to the unconstitutionality of the Repealing Act. If they were right in that, and also in their views in respect to the powers of the Supreme Court, a _mandamus_ would of course have been authorized to compel the treasury to pay the judges their salaries.