lavery, and he does so not because he says it is right in
itself,--he does not give any opinion on that,--but because it has been
decided by the Court, and, being decided by the Court, he is, and you
are, bound to take it in your political action as law,--not that he
judges at all of its merits, but because a decision of the Court is to
him a "Thus saith the Lord." He places it on that ground alone, and you
will bear in mind that thus committing himself unreservedly to this
decision, commits himself just as firmly to the next one as to this. He
did not commit himself on account of the merit or demerit of the
decision, but it is a "Thus saith the Lord." The next decision as much
as this will be a "Thus saith the Lord." There is nothing that can
divert or turn him away from this decision. It is nothing that I point
out to him that his great prototype, General Jackson, did not believe in
the binding force of decisions. It is nothing to him that Jefferson did
not so believe. I have said that I have often heard him approve of
Jackson's course in disregarding the decision of the Supreme Court
pronouncing a national bank constitutional. He says I did not hear him
say so. He denies the accuracy of my recollection. I say he ought to
know better than I, but I will make no question about this thing, though
it still seems to me that I heard him say it twenty times. I will tell
him, though, that he now claims to stand on the Cincinnati platform,
which affirms that Congress cannot charter a national bank in the teeth
of that old standing decision that Congress can charter a bank. And I
remind him of another piece of Illinois history on the question of
respect for judicial decisions, and it is a piece of Illinois history
belonging to a time when a large party to which Judge Douglas belonged,
were displeased with a decision of the Supreme Court of Illinois,
because they had decided that a Governor could not remove a secretary of
State, and I know that Judge Douglas will not deny that he was then in
favour of over-slaughing that decision, by the mode of adding five new
Judges, so as to vote down the four old ones. Not only so, but it ended
in the Judge's sitting down on the very bench as one of the five new
judges to break down the four old ones. It was in this way precisely
that he got his title of Judge. Now, when the Judge tells me that men
appointed conditionally to sit as members of a Court will have to be
catechized beforehand upon