As to any method of protecting the federal system within its own household, that is to say, as against Congress, it was proposed in the convention, for one thing, that each House of Congress might call upon the judges for opinions; and, again, it was urged, and that repeatedly and with great persistence, that the judges should be joined with the executive in passing on the approval or disapproval of legislative acts,--in what we call the veto power. It was explicitly said, in objecting to this, that the judges would have the right to disregard unconstitutional laws anyway,--an opinion put forward by some of the weightiest members. Yet some denied it. And we observe that the power was not expressly given. When we find such a power expressly denied, and yet not expressly given; and when we observe, for example, that leading public men, _e.g._, so conspicuous a member of the convention as Charles Pinckney of South Carolina, afterwards a senator from that State, wholly denied the power ten years later;[23] it being also true that he and others of his way of thinking urged the express restraints on state legislation,--we may justly reach the conclusion that this question, while not overlooked, was intentionally left untouched. Like the question of the bank and various others, presumably it was so left in order not to stir up enemies to the new instrument; left to be settled by the silent determinations of time, or by later discussion. Turning now to the actual practice under the government of the United States, we find that the judges of the Supreme Court had hardly taken their seats, at the beginning of the government, when Chief Justice Jay and several other judges, in 1790, communicated to the President objections to the Judiciary Act, as violating the Constitution, in naming the judges of the Supreme Court to be judges also of the circuit courts.[24] These judges, however, did not refuse to act under this unconstitutional statute; and the question did not come judicially before the court until Marshall’s time, in 1803,[25] when it was held that the question must now be regarded as settled in favor of the statute, by reason of acquiescence since the beginning of the government.[26] In observing, historically, the earlier conceptions of the judges of the Supreme Court as to the method of dealing with unconstitutional legislation, one or two other transactions should be looked at. In 1792 (1 U. S. Statutes, 243) a statute was enacted which required the circuit court, partly composed, as we have seen, of the judges of the Supreme Court, to pass on the claims of certain soldiers and others demanding pensions, and to report to the Secretary of War; who was, in turn, to revise these returns and report to Congress. The judges found great difficulty in acting under this statute, because it imposed on them duties not judicial in their nature; and they expressed their views in various ways.