It chanced that the case came before John Marshall, who had recently assumed the station of Chief Justice, to which John Adams appointed him in the closing months of his administration. The previous history of the court, with the exception of two or three cases, had been insignificant. Its decisions during the first ten years do not fill as many pages as do those for a single year at the present time. Jay had resigned its headship to undertake the mission to England, impressed with the belief, as he afterward said, that the court could never obtain the energy, weight, and dignity essential to affording due support to the National Government. He refused to return to the bench, and Marshall was appointed, with whom the second era of the court begins. Marshall was a Virginian, a school-fellow of Monroe, and co-worker with Madison in the Virginia Constitutional Convention. But the war acquaintance which he formed with Washington and Hamilton, added to his personal views, turned him toward Federalism. As a Virginian, he was cultivated by members of that party, office after office being placed at his option. Accepting the Chief-Justiceship under a life tenure, he was "saddled" on the Republicans, as they said. The decision in the case of Marbury _vs._ Madison was one of many which emanated from Marshall, silently shoring up the fabric of the Union as it was erected by the hand of necessity. "The theory that an act of legislature repugnant to the Constitution is void," said the Chief Justice, in granting Marbury and others the withheld commissions, through the district court, "is essential to a written constitution, and is consequently to be considered by this court as one of the fundamental principles of our society." We speak so easily now of declaring a law unconstitutional, thereby rendering it null and void, and we acquiesce so readily in these decisions that it is difficult to imagine the small beginnings of this great power exercised by one branch of the Federal Government over another. By holding that the mandamus must issue from the District and not the Supreme Court, the case might have been dismissed briefly. The Republicans thought the long disquisition on the powers of the court and its relation to the executive branch a kind of defiance and entirely unwarranted. It was the beginning of a long list of similar offences by Marshall. Meanwhile the new Administration had continued its reform activities, "to restore the government to its principles, amend its defects, reform abuses, and introduce order and economy in the administration," as Monroe outlined it to President Jefferson. The latter summed up the reform work of the Republicans at the end of the first session: