Turning back to the case itself, we ought finally to note how Marshall utilized this opportunity to make manifest the newly found solidarity of the Court. For the first time in its history the Court was one voice, speaking through its Chief Justice the ineluctable decrees of the law. Ordinarily even Marshall would not have found this achievement an easy task, for there were difficult personalities among his associates. He had in Adams's Cabinet demonstrated his faculty "of putting his ideas into the minds of others, unconsciously to them," and of this power he now made use, as well as of the advantage to be obtained from the impending common danger. The case of Marbury vs. Madison was decided on February 24, 1803, and therefore fell between two other events which were immediately of almost as great importance in the struggle now waxing over the judiciary. The first of these was the impeachment of Judge Pickering of the New Hampshire District Court, which was suggested by the President on the 3d of February and voted by the House on the 18th of February; the other was an address which Justice Chase delivered on the 2d of May to a Baltimore grand jury, assailing the repeal of the Judiciary Act and universal suffrage and predicting the deterioration of "our republican Constitution ... into a mobocracy, the worst of all possible governments." ¹ Considering the fact that the President was still smarting from the Chief Justice's lash and also that Chase himself was more heartily detested by the Republicans than any other member of the Supreme Bench, nothing could have been more untimely than this fresh judicial excursion into the field of "manners and morals," and partisan malice was naturally alert to interpret it as something even more offensive. The report soon came from Baltimore that Chase had deliberately assailed the Administration as "weak, pusillanimous, relaxed," and governed by the sole desire of continuing "in unfairly acquired power." But even before this intelligence arrived, Jefferson had decided that the opportunity afforded by Chase's outburst was too good a one to be neglected. Writing on the 13th of May to Nicholson of Maryland, who already had Pickering's impeachment in charge, the President inquired: "Ought this seditious and official attack on the principles of our Constitution and the proceedings of a State go unpunished?" But he straightway added: "The question is for your consideration; for myself it is better I should not interfere." ¹ The account here given of Chase's trial is based on Charles Evans's shorthand Report (Baltimore, 1805), supplemented by J. Q. Adams's Memoirs.