A few months later, in consequence of the Administration's vigorous measures against nullification in South Carolina, things were temporarily wearing a brighter aspect. Yet that the fundamental elements of the situation had been thereby altered, Marshall did not believe. "To men who think as you and I do," he wrote Story, toward the end of 1834, "the present is gloomy enough; and the future presents no cheering prospect. In the South ... those who support the Executive do not support the Government. They sustain the personal power of the President, but labor incessantly to impair the legitimate powers of the Government. Those who oppose the rash and violent measures of the Executive ... are generally the bitter enemies of Constitutional Government. Many of them are the avowed advocates of a league; and those who do not go the whole length, go a great part of the way. What can we hope for in such circumstances?" Yet there was one respect in which the significance of Marshall's achievement must have been as clear to himself as it was to his contemporaries. He had failed for the time being to establish his definition of national power, it is true, but he had made the Supreme Court one of the great political forces of the country. The very ferocity with which the pretensions of the Court were assailed in certain quarters was indirect proof of its power, but there was also direct testimony of a high order. In 1830 Alexis de Tocqueville, the French statesman, visited the United States just as the rough frontier democracy was coming into its own. Only through the Supreme Court, in his opinion, were the forces of renewal and growth thus liberated to be kept within the bounds set by existing institutions. "The peace, the prosperity, and the very existence of the Union," he wrote, "are vested in the hands of the seven Federal judges. Without them the Constitution would be a dead letter: the Executive appeals to them for assistance against the encroachments of the legislative power; the Legislature demands their protection against the assaults of the Executive; they defend the Union from the disobedience of the States, the States from the exaggerated claims of the Union, the public interest against private interests and the conservative spirit of stability against the fickleness of the democracy." The contrast between these observations and the disheartened words in which Jay declined renomination to the chief justiceship in 1801 gives perhaps a fair measure of Marshall's accomplishment.