town, and Monmouth, with bad equipment, scanty stores, and depleted ranks. He endured under Washington the privations of Valley Forge. All the time he was thinking, reflecting. What was the matter with America? Why did not people and politicians give adequate support to the noblest cause in human history? Army experience put the question. Political experience furnished the

answer.

His active military career closed in 1779. The reduction of the Continental Army, following the arrival of Rochambeau's expeditionary force, left such an excess of officers that an honorable discharge came before another opportunity for active service. His furlough gave him an opportunity to visit his father, now promoted to colonel and stationed at Yorktown. The young officer's praises had so often been sung by his father and brothers, that the belles of Yorktown were all of a twitter to meet him. Expecting a young Adonis faultlessly attired in the blue and red uniform of the Virginia line, the older girls were disappointed to find an awkward, shy, loose-jointed frontiersman, whose shabby and ill-fitting uniform hung on him as on a clothes-rack. But fourteen-year-old Mary Ambler, blessed with more penetration than her elders, calmly announced that she intended to win Captain Marshall. She already had won him!

Fourteen was too young for marriage, even in eighteenth-century Virginia, and Captain Marshall had his way to make. The spring of 1790 found him at William and Mary College, taking the law lectures of George Wythe. That was the only legal education, in the modern sense of the word, that the great Chief Justice ever received. But, such as it was, no better could be had in America. Wythe's lectures antedated by at least two years the first law school in America Judge Reeve's at Litch

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field, Connecticut; and the first permanent chair of law-at the University of Pennsylvania - was founded ten years later. All the great lawyers of the Revolutionary, and most of those of the Federalist, period were trained by reading law in the office of a successful practitioner.

A few months after this brief course, John Marshall was admitted to the bar of Fauquier County. For over a year he waited at his old home for clients who never came. The county then elected him to the House of Delegates at Richmond. There in 1783 he wedded Mary Ambler. She was seventeen; and her twenty-seven-year-old husband had only one guinea left to his name after paying the parson's fee!

III

Richmond at the close of the Revolution had no suggestion of the respectable, well-built capital of the Southern Confederacy. One four-room tavern accommodated the legislators, and a barn-like wooden capitol housed their deliberations. Most of the white inhabitants were Scots merchants, men who had monopolized Virginia business before the Revolution, lost all their gains through the confiscatory acts, and returned hopefully for more. Their flimsy wooden houses straggled up the hill as if (Colonel Marshall suggested) they had been brought over by the Scots on their backs, and dropped at whatever point the owner's strength gave out. In one of these two-room tenements the young couple set up housekeeping, with one slave presented by the colonel.

But young Marshall, with his usual sound judgment, had chosen the very place to make his living and reputation: a rapidly growing capital, where the best legal talent of the state was concentrated, and where a Wythe, a Car

rington, and a Pendleton sat on the Supreme bench. Great bars make great judges,' observed the late John Chipman Gray. 'Chief Justice Marshall would never have reached his summit alone, nor if his early legal associates had been a company of ignorant and pettifogging attorneys.'

The next fifteen years were the formative period of Marshall's life, when the ideas suggested by his war experience became settled convictions. His immediate entrance into the State Legislature, he afterward wrote, revealed a slackness in administration, and conditions approaching anarchy in the organization of the government, which explained our inefficiency in the conduct of the war. 'The general tendency of State politics convinced me that no sage and permanent remedy could be found but in a more efficient and better organized General Government.'

Another young officer and lawyer, Alexander Hamilton, was making similar observations in the North, and reached the same conclusion. Thousands of propertied Americans were being taught in the same school of experience. But some startling event was necessary to spur them to action. That event was a popular uprising in Massachusetts.

Shays's Rebellion proved an acid test of radical and conservative. The lifelong conflict of Jefferson and Marshall is foretold by their 'reactions.' Jefferson hoped we should never be twenty years without such a rebellion -and Jefferson almost had his wish. 'What country can preserve its liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? . . . The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.'

Marshall's comment is equally significant. These violent, I fear bloody,

dissensions in a state I had thought inferior in wisdom and virtue to no one in the union, added to the strong tendency which the politics of many eminent characters among ourselves have to promote private and public dishonesty, cast a deep shade over the bright prospect which the revolution in America and the establishment of our free governments had opened to the votaries of liberty throughout the globe. I fear, and there is no opinion more degrading to the dignity of man, that these have truth on their side who say that man is incapable of governing himself.'

These words were written at the age of thirty-one, and to General James Wilkinson, of all people! Marshall thereby announces his enrollment with the Federalists, the men who made it their task to bridle and tame the wild forces let loose by a revolution begun in the name of the rights of man.

The next year found Marshall a delegate to the Virginia Convention called to pass upon the new Federal Constitution. Already enough states had ratified to put it into effect; but an American Union without Virginia would have been like a League of Nations without America. In what are perhaps the most fascinating chapters in his book, Senator Beveridge describes at length the debates of the Convention; and seldom if ever in our history has debate been of such high quality and character. Virginia was suspicious of the Constitution. A snap vote at the opening session would have brought certain rejection. 'Had the influence of character been removed, the intrinsic merits of the instrument would not have secured its adoption,' Marshall afterwards wrote. The influence of Washington and Randolph, the patient arguments of Madison and Marshall, and, it must be added, some rather questionable manipulation, finally secured a majority of ten for the Union.

IV

When Washington was inaugurated, Marshall was in his thirty-fourth year. His mind was like an etcher's plate ready for the acid bath. The lines were already scratched. Time and experience acted as a mordant to bite them in. Elsewhere, the waxy 'ground' of prejudice repelled new impressions. Belief in government for the people; distrust in government of or by the people; hatred of slackness, dishonesty, and disloyalty; love of orderly and efficient administration; belief in the sanctity of property rights and of contracts; a profound conviction that only a strong national government could curb the democratic and anarchical tendencies of the states these were the principles that John Marshall held from the seventeen-eighties to the eighteenthirties. His political education was complete, for he was now receptive only to those teachings that confirmed and strengthened his opinions.

The next few years brought many such lessons. First the French Revolution, driving a 'red-hot plowshare through our history.' News of the great journées of 1792, and the war of all peoples against all kings, produced a hysterical enthusiasm which confirmed Marshall's low opinion of popular wisdom. Then came word that made the Revolution a dividing line in American politics. War had begun between England and France, and Citizen Genet arrived to demand full execution of the treaty of alliance.

To one side of the furrow moved Washington, Hamilton, Marshall, and all who wished peace and ordered liberty; to the other moved Jefferson, Madison, the State of Virginia, and all who feared government more than they did anarchy. The party alignment which stood until 1815 was completed. To Marshall, as to all Federalists,

French Jacobinism seemed dangerous to liberty and property in the same measure that Bolshevism threatens the standing order of to-day. Thomas Jefferson, on the contrary, 'would have seen half the earth desolated' rather than the failure of the Revolution. For him, the great danger to America was the financial entente with Britain, which he believed Hamilton had concluded. As Jefferson thought, so thought most plain Americans.

On Marshall, mainly, fell the hopeless task of defending Washington's policy of neutrality in Washington's native state. One would think that French equality, after the horrors of Santo Domingo, would have found few partisans in Virginia; but Virginia still deemed her social system invulnerable. Those enthusiastic notions' which Marshall had shed in the army were still prevalent. Virginia still owed more than two million pounds to British capitalists, and suspected the efforts of Hamilton to create an Amercian moneyed power. Consequently 'our distinguished anarchists,' as Colonel Carrington called Jefferson and Madison, were able to swing a slave-owning aristocracy to the Jacobin cause. Jay's treaty of 1794 completed their work. Washington reluctantly signed that humiliating document, as the alternative to war; but Virginia concluded, with Jefferson, that the hair of our American Samson had been 'shorn by the harlot England.'

Here, again, Virginia's opinion ran counter to her true interests. Jay's treaty shifted the pre-war indebtedness of her planters onto the United States. Marshall was disgusted by this perverse attitude of his native state, and exasperated by the personal abuse to which his support of Washington exposed him. 'Seriously,' he writes a friend in 1794, 'there appears to me every day to be more folly, envy, malice, and damn rascality in the world

than there was the day before, and I do verily begin to think that plain downright honesty and unintriguing integrity will be kicked out of doors.'

The defense of Washington's administration in Virginia was not wholly an ungrateful task. The President offered Marshall in succession the attorneygeneralship, the War Department, and the State Department. But Marshall's family was growing, his law practice brought in the then enormous income of five thousand dollars a year, and his environment was congenial. Social ostracism was the penalty for political heresy in Federalist New England, but Virginia politics were not conducted with that fierce Puritan intolerance. Despite his Federalism, Marshall's social and professional preeminence in Richmond was unquestioned. He occupied a comfortable brick house, entertained hosts of friends, and had no temptation to leave.

This formative period in Marshall's opinions was also the acquisitive period in his education. During his active career at Richmond he gathered the knowledge from which his wisdom was expressed. For I wish, with a layman's rashness, to put forth the opinion that Marshall was learned as well as brilliant in the law. Tradition has it otherwise, and Senator Beveridge accepts tradition. Marshall's formal legal education amounted, as we have seen, to very little. But his hundred-page note to the case of Mandeville vs. Riddle, in 1803, for instance, shows a profound knowledge of both common and civil law. His great decisions on international law could not have been made without a thorough study of such books and precedents as existed. President Adams, after an interview with Marshall on the eve of his French mission, in 1797, wrote that his appointee was 'learned in the law of nations.' Senator Beveridge, who does not accept this

opinion, imagines Marshall acquiring a cheap reputation by listening politely while the President expounded. But John Adams was never known to overrate the ability of anyone but an Adams. That a young Virginian, in particular, could have bluffed him on international law is unthinkable!

Marshall did not parade his learning. He acquired knowledge easily and quickly, digested everything that he read or heard, and by disciplined and systematic thinking was able to reach conclusions from data stored in the recesses of his memory, instead of having to consult indexes and the reports. As William Wirt wrote in 1806, his mind was an 'inexhaustible quarry from which he draws his materials and builds his fabrics.' His arguments and decisions flowed smoothly, without effort. Only the results appear. It is true that Marshall does not belong with his younger colleague, Story, in the first rank of legal scholars. His strongest intellectual points were his power of analysis, his faculty of close and logical reasoning, and his intuitive perception of justice. But these qualities alone would not have made him great. Men of intellect without knowledge have occasionally reached a higher place than Marshall's. They have always been found out, sooner or later.

It was a mission to Paris that tested Marshall's combination of sound knowledge and keen intellect. He was fortytwo years old when he accepted a commission from President Adams for the difficult and delicate task of adjusting our relations with the French Republic. Save for his army service and two brief visits to Philadelphia, he had never been out of Virginia. In contrast, the other two commissioners were older men, of wealth and wide experience. Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, of the famous Charleston family, had been educated at Westminister, Oxford, the

Inns of Court, and Caen. Elbridge Gerry was a Harvard graduate, a political pupil of Samuel Adams, and an officer-holder since 1772. Yet the provincial Virginian not only eclipsed his colleagues, but carried off the honors in a clash with Talleyrand, the keenest diplomat of Europe.

Marshall kept the records of the negotiation, and drafted all the formal notes. These fully justify the President's estimate of his ability. But, as John Quincy Adams remarked, European governments are 'accustomed to reason so little, and so much to force, that a victory over them of mere logic is as easy as it is insignificant.' The French Directory, irremovable at home and invincible abroad, was in no mood to negotiate on equal terms. Talleyrand believed that he could avoid an issue until the French spoliations destroyed our merchant marine, and Spain was forced to retrocede Louisiana. To gain time, he refused to receive the Americans officially.

In the meantime, Talleyrand sent the dubious trio best known as Messrs. X., Y., and Z., to play upon the fears of the envoys, and to sound their pockets. A bribe, a loan, and an apology for President Adams's patriotism were demanded as prerequisites for the privilege of negotiating with Talleyrand. Pressed for an alternative, Monsieur Y. hinted at the power of the French party in America, and lightly touched upon the fate of sundry small nations which had defied or resisted the French Republic.

These importunities and threats made a deep impression on Elbridge Gerry, who had come to Paris obsessed with the idea of peace at any price. They did not in the least disturb Marshall. 'Our case is different from that of the minor nations of Europe,' he told Monsieur Y. "They were unable to maintain their independence and did not ex

pect to do so. America is a great, and, so far as concerns her self-defense, a powerful nation.'

It was Marshall, moreover, who discovered the weak spot in his adversary's armor. France could not afford to risk a war which would force America into the arms of England. 'No consideration would be sufficiently powerful to check the extremities to which the temper of this government will carry it, but an apprehension that we may be thrown into the arms of Britain,' wrote Marshall to General Washington at Mount Vernon.

Through the mist of language and intrigue, he had detected the vital spot of Talleyrand's American policy. Talleyrand would go far, but not so far as to risk an alliance of America's potential with Britain's actual sea-power.

On this assumption, Marshall and Pinckney acted. After obtaining official assurance that an unneutral loan must precede any negotiation, they left Paris. Gerry, who fondly believed his presence necessary to prevent war, remained behind.

V

On his return to America, in June, 1798, John Marshall found himself a national figure. President Adams had published the X. Y. Z. despatches. Preparedness measures were being rushed through Congress, naval reprisals on French warships had already begun, a national spirit was fast growing. Marshall was escorted into Philadelphia by three troops of cavalry, and given a banquet at which 'Millions for defense, but not one cent for tribute,' was first uttered. The President offered him a seat in the Supreme Court; but he preferred to return to his law practice.

The X. Y. Z. papers were the heaviest blows that were ever dealt Thomas Jefferson. From the moment of their