mobocracy, the worst of all possible governments. I can only
lament that the main pillar of our State constitution has
already been thrown down by the establishment of universal
suffrage. By this shock alone the whole building totters to
its base and will crumble into ruins before many years elapse,
unless it be restored to its original state.

All this was less indefensible under the judicial practice of a
century ago than it would be now, and there were not enough votes
of Guilty on the article of impeachment founded upon it to secure
a conviction.

In the same year, Judge Alexander Addison of the Circuit Court of
Pennsylvania was charging a Pennsylvania grand jury that the
Jeffersonians had assumed a name that did not belong to them.
"Such men," he said, "disgrace the name of Republicans by
exclusively assuming it. In their sheep's clothing they are
ravening wolves."[Footnote: Wharton's State Trials, 47, note.]
For this, among other things, he was very properly impeached and
removed in 1803, after the Republicans came into power in that
State.[Footnote: McMaster, "History of the People of the United
States," III, 154.]

It is difficult for the American of the twentieth century to
conceive how honorable men could so have abused official
position.[Footnote: Wharton's State Trials, 376. Justice
Washington made it a rule not to enter into any political
questions in his charges unless necessary for the guidance of the
grand jury in the work before them, and until 1817, when party
feeling had moderated, not to give out copies of any charges for