For several years after this, hardly a session of Congress convened in which there was not introduced some measure for the purpose either of curbing the Supreme Court or of curtailing Marshall's influence on its decisions. One measure, for example, proposed the repeal of Section XXV; another, the enlargement of the Court from seven to ten judges; another, the requirement that any decision setting aside a state law must have the concurrence of five out of seven judges; another, the allowance of appeals to the Court on decisions adverse to the constitutionality of state laws as well as on decisions sustaining them. Finally, in January, 1826, a bill enlarging the Court to ten judges passed the House by a vote of 132 to 27. In the Senate, Rowan of Kentucky moved an amendment requiring in all cases the concurrence of seven of the proposed ten judges. In a speech which was typical of current criticism of the Court he bitterly assailed the judges for the protection they had given the Bank--that "political juggernaut," that "creature of the perverted corporate powers of the Federal Government"--and he described the Court itself as "placed above the control of the will of the people, in a state of disconnection with them, inaccessible to the charities and sympathies of human life." The amendment failed, however, and in the end the bill itself was rejected. Yet a proposition to swamp the Court which received the approval of four-fifths of the House of Representatives cannot be lightly dismissed as an aberration. Was it due to a fortuitous coalescence of local grievances, or was there a general underlying cause? That Marshall's principles of constitutional law did not entirely accord with the political and economic life of the nation at this period must be admitted. The Chief Justice was at once behind his times and ahead of them. On the one hand, he was behind his times because he failed to appreciate adequately the fact that freedom was necessary to frontier communities in meeting their peculiar problems--a freedom which the doctrine of State Rights promised them--and so he had roused Kentucky's wrath by the pedantic and, as the Court itself was presently forced to admit, unworkable decision in Green vs. Biddle. Then on the other hand, the nationalism of this period was of that negative kind which was better content to worship the Constitution than to make a really serviceable application of the national powers. After the War of 1812 the great and growing task which confronted the rapidly expanding nation was that of providing adequate transportation, and had the old federalism from which Marshall derived his doctrines been at the helm, this task would undoubtedly have been taken over by the National Government. By Madison's veto of the Cumberland Road Bill, however, in 1816, this enterprise was handed over to the States; and they eagerly seized upon it after the opening of the Erie Canal in 1825 and the