servants. If I may use a legal phrase, the
people are grantors, not grantees. They give to the government, and to
each branch of it, all the power it possesses, or can possess; and what
is not given they retain. In England, before her revolution, and in the
rest of Europe since, if we would know the extent of liberty or popular
right, we must go to grants, to charters, to allowances and indulgences.
But with us, we go to grants and to constitutions to learn the extent of
the powers of government. No political power is more original than the
Constitution; none is possessed which is not there granted; and the
grant, and the limitations in the grant, are in the same instrument.

The powers, therefore, belonging to any branch of our government, are to
be construed and settled, not by remote analogies drawn from other
governments, but from the words of the grant itself, in their plain
sense and necessary import, and according to an interpretation
consistent with our own history and the spirit of our own institutions.
I will never agree that a President of the United States holds the whole
undivided power of office in his own hands, upon the theory that he is
responsible for the entire action of the whole body of those engaged in
carrying on the government and executing the laws. Such a responsibility
is purely ideal, delusive, and vain. There is, there can be, no
substantial responsibility, any further than every individual is
answerable, not merely in his reputation, not merely in the opinion of
mankind, but _to the law_, for the faithful discharge of his own
appropriate duties. Again and again we hear it said that the President
is responsible to the American people! that he is responsible to the bar
of public opinion! For whatever he does, he assumes accountability to
the American people! For whatever he omits, he expects to be brought to
the high bar of public opinion! And this is thought enough for a
limited, restrained, republican government! an undefined, undefinable,
ideal responsibility to the public judgment!

Sir, if all this mean any thing, if it be not empty sound, it means no
less than that the President may do any thing and every thing which he
may expect to be tolerated in doing. He may go just so far as he thinks
it safe to go; and Cromwell and Bonaparte went no farther. I ask again,
Sir, is this legal responsibility? Is this the true nature of a
government with written laws and limited powers? And allow me,