Jefferson also prepared the famous Kentucky resolutions, which were adopted by the legislature of that State,—the authorship, however, being kept secret till Jefferson avowed it, twenty years later. These much-discussed resolutions have been said to have originated the doctrine of nullification, and to contain that principle of secession upon which the South acted in 1861. They may be summed up roughly as follows: The source of all political power is in the people. The people have, by the compact known as the Constitution, granted certain specified powers to the federal government; all other powers, if not granted to the several state governments, are retained by the people. The alien and sedition laws assume the exercise by the federal government of powers not granted to it by the Constitution. They are therefore void. Thus far there can be no question that Jefferson’s argument was sound, and its soundness would not be denied, even at the present day. But the question then arose: what next? May the laws be disregarded and disobeyed by the States or by individuals, or must they be obeyed until some competent authority has pronounced them void? and if so, what is that authority? We understand now that the Supreme Court has sole authority to decide upon the constitutionality of the acts of Congress. It was so held, for the first time, in the year 1803, in the case of Marbury _v._ Madison, by Chief Justice Marshall and his associates; and that decision, though resisted at the time, has long been accepted by the country as a whole. But this case did not arise until several years after the Kentucky Resolutions were written. Moreover, Marshall was an extreme Federalist, and his view was by no means the commonly accepted view. Jefferson scouted it. He protested all his life against the assumption that the Supreme Court, a body of men appointed for life, and thus removed from all control by the people, should have the enormous power of construing the Constitution and of passing upon the validity of national laws. In a letter written in 1804, he said: “You seem to think it devolved on the judges to decide the validity of the sedition law. But nothing in the Constitution has given them a right to decide for the executive more than the executive to decide for them. But the opinion which gives to the judges the right to decide what laws are constitutional and what not—not only for themselves in their own sphere of action, but for the legislature and executive also in their spheres—would make the judiciary a despotic branch.”(3)