among influential Virginians, like John Randolph and Senator William
Giles, to purge the Supreme Court of Federalists. Among the associate
justices of this court was Samuel Chase, a signer of the Declaration of
Independence and an able lawyer, but an arrogant and indiscreet
partisan. Chase had made himself obnoxious on various public occasions
and so was considered to be the best subject to impeach; but if they
succeeded with him the Jeffersonians proclaimed their intention of
removing all his brethren seriatim, including the chief offender of all,
John Marshall. One day in December, 1804, Senator Giles, of Virginia,
in a conversation which John Quincy Adams has reported in his diary,
discussed the issue at large, and that conversation is most apposite
now, since it shows how early the inevitable tendency was developed to
make judges who participate in political and social controversies
responsible to the popular will. The conversation is too long to extract
in full, but a few sentences will convey its purport:--

"He treated with the utmost contempt the idea of an _independent_
judiciary.... And if the judges of the Supreme Court should dare, _as
they had done_, to declare an act of Congress unconstitutional, or to
send a mandamus to the Secretary of State, _as they had done_, it was
the undoubted right of the: House of Representatives to impeach them,
and of the Senate to remove them, for giving such opinions, however
honest or sincere they may have been in entertaining them. * * * And a
removal by impeachment was nothing more than a declaration by Congress
to this effect: You hold dangerous opinions, and if you are suffered to
carry them into effect you will work the destruction of the nation. _We
want your offices_, for the purpose of giving them to men who will fill
them better."[13]

Jefferson, though he controlled a majority in the Senate, failed by a