hould be executed. It has been solemnly decided to be in
actual force, by the highest judicial authority; its execution is
demanded for the relief of free citizens, now suffering the pains of
unjust and unlawful imprisonment; yet the President refuses to execute
it.

In the case of the Chicago Road, some sessions ago, the President
approved the bill, but accompanied his approval by a message, saying how
far he deemed it a proper law, and how far, therefore, it ought to be
carried into execution.

In the case of the harbor bill of the late session, being applied to by
a member of Congress for directions for carrying parts of the law into
effect, he declined giving them, and made a distinction between such
parts of the law as he should cause to be executed, and such as he
should not; and his right to make this distinction has been openly
maintained, by those who habitually defend his measures. Indeed, Sir,
these, and other instances of liberties taken with plain statute laws,
flow naturally from the principles expressly avowed by the President,
under his own hand. In that important document, Sir, upon which it seems
to be his fate to stand or to fall before the American people, the veto
message, he holds the following language: "Each public officer who
takes an oath to support the Constitution, swears that he will support
it as he understands it, and not as it is understood by others." Mr.
President, the general adoption of the sentiments expressed in this
sentence would dissolve our government. It would raise every man's
private opinions into a standard for his own conduct; and there
certainly is, there can be, no government, where every man is to judge
for himself of his own rights and his own obligations. Where every one
is his own arbiter, force, and not law, is the governing power. He who
may judge for himself, and decide for himself, must execute his own
decisions; and this is the law of force. I confess, Sir, it strikes me
with astonishment, that so wild, so disorganizing, a sentiment should be
uttered by a President of the United States. I should think it must have
escaped from its author through want of reflection, or from the habit of
little reflection on such subjects, if I could suppose it possible,
that, on a question exciting so much public attention, and of so much
national importance, any such extraordinary doctrine could find its way,
through inadvertence, into a formal and solemn public act. Standing as