vestigation to contradict the oaths of
such witnesses. Every coward knows that he can employ insulting language
against the President with impunity, and every false or prejudiced
witness can attempt to swear away his character before such a committee
without the fear of contradiction.

Thus for months, whilst doing my best at one end of the Avenue to
perform my high and responsible duties to the country, has there been a
committee of the House of Representatives in session at the other end of
the Avenue spreading a drag net, without the shadow of authority from
the House, over the whole Union, to catch any disappointed man willing
to malign my character; and all this in secret conclave. The lion's
mouth at Venice, into which secret denunciations were dropped, is an
apt illustration of the Covode committee. The star-chamber, tyrannical
and odious as it was, never proceeded in such a manner. For centuries
there has been nothing like it in any civilized country, except the
revolutionary tribunal of France in the days of Robespierre. Now I
undertake to state and to prove that should the proceedings of the
committee be sanctioned by the House and become a precedent for future
times the balance of the Constitution will be entirely upset, and there
will no longer remain the three coordinate and independent branches of
the Government--legislative, executive, and judicial. The worst fears of
the patriots and statesmen who framed the Constitution in regard to the
usurpations of the legislative on the executive and judicial branches
will then be realized. In the language of Mr. Madison, speaking on this
very subject in the forty-eighth number of the Federalist:

In a representative republic, where the executive magistracy is
carefully limited, both in the extent and duration of its power, and
where the legislative power is exercised by an assembly which is
inspired, by a supposed influence over the people, with an intrepid
confidence in its own strength, which is sufficiently numerous to feel
all the passions which actuate a multitude, yet not so numerous as to
be incapable of pursuing the objects of its passions by means which
reason prescribes, it is against the enterprising ambition of this
department that the people ought to indulge all their jealousy and
exhaust all their precautions.

And in the expressive and pointed language of Mr. Jefferson, when
speaking of the tendency of the legislative branch o