sider this most strange proposition. The
President is the chief executive magistrate. He is commander-in-chief of
the army and navy; nominates all persons to office; claims a right to
remove all at will, and to control all, while yet in office; dispenses
all favors; and wields the whole patronage of the government. And the
proposition is, that the duty of defending the integrity of the
Constitution against the representatives of the States and against the
representatives of the people, _results to him from the very nature of
his office_; and that the founders of our republic have given to this
duty, thus confided to him, peculiar solemnity and force!

Mr. President, the contest, for ages, has been to rescue Liberty from
the grasp of executive power. Whoever has engaged in her sacred cause,
from the days of the downfall of those great aristocracies which had
stood between the king and the people to the time of our own
independence, has struggled for the accomplishment of that single
object. On the long list of the champions of human freedom, there is not
one name dimmed by the reproach of advocating the extension of executive
authority; on the contrary, the uniform and steady purpose of all such
champions has been to limit and restrain it. To this end the spirit of
liberty, growing more and more enlightened and more and more vigorous
from age to age, has been battering, for centuries, against the solid
butments of the feudal system. To this end, all that could be gained
from the imprudence, snatched from the weakness, or wrung from the
necessities of crowned heads, has been carefully gathered up, secured,
and hoarded, as the rich treasures, the very jewels of liberty. To this
end, popular and representative right has kept up its warfare against
prerogative, with various success; sometimes writing the history of a
whole age in blood, sometimes witnessing the martyrdom of Sidneys and
Russells, often baffled and repulsed, but still gaining, on the whole,
and holding what it gained with a grasp which nothing but the complete
extinction of its own being could compel it to relinquish. At length,
the great conquest over executive power, in the leading western states
of Europe, has been accomplished. The feudal system, like other
stupendous fabrics of past ages, is known only by the rubbish which it
has left behind it. Crowned heads have been compelled to submit to the
restraints of law, and the PEOPLE, with that intelligence and