ady to confer the most dangerous power, in the hope
that they and their friends may bask in its sunshine, while enemies only
shall be withered by its frown.

I will not go into the mention of names. I will give no enumeration of
persons; but I ask you to turn your minds back, and recollect who the
distinguished men were who supported, in the Senate, General Jackson's
administration for the first two years; and I will ask you what you
suppose they think now of that power and that discretion which they so
freely confided to executive hands. What do they think of the whole
career of that administration, the commencement of which, and indeed the
existence of which, owed so much to their own great exertions?

In addition to the establishment of this power of unlimited and
causeless removal, another doctrine has been put forth, more vague, it
is true, but altogether unconstitutional, and tending to like dangerous
results. In some loose, indefinite, and unknown sense, the President has
been called the _representative of the whole American people_. He has
called himself so repeatedly, and been so denominated by his friends a
thousand times. Acts, for which no specific authority has been found
either in the Constitution or the laws, have been justified on the
ground that the President is the representative of the whole American
people. Certainly, this is not constitutional language. Certainly, the
Constitution nowhere calls the President the universal representative of
the people. The constitutional representatives of the people are in the
House of Representatives, exercising powers of legislation. The
President is an executive officer, appointed in a particular manner, and
clothed with prescribed and limited powers. It may be thought to be of
no great consequence, that the President should call himself, or that
others should call him, the sole representative of all the people,
although he has no such appellation or character in the Constitution.
But, in these matters, words are things. If he is the people's
representative, and as such may exercise power, without any other grant,
what is the limit to that power? And what may not an unlimited
representative of the people do? When the Constitution expressly creates
representatives, as members of Congress, it regulates, defines, and
limits their authority. But if the executive chief magistrate, merely
because he is the executive chief magistrate, may assume to himself
another char