l responsibilities which he had thus incurred.

But if I had committed a breach of privilege, it was the privilege of
the Senate, and not of this House, which was violated. I was answerable
there, and not here. They had no right, as it seems to me, to
prosecute me in these Halls, nor have you the right in law or under
the Constitution, as I respectfully submit, to take jurisdiction over
offences committed against them. The Constitution does not justify them
in making such a request, nor this House in granting it. If, unhappily,
the day should ever come when sectional or party feeling should run so
high as to control all other considerations of public duty or justice,
how easy it will be to use such precedents for the excuse of arbitrary
power, in either House, to expel members of the minority who may have
rendered themselves obnoxious to the prevailing spirit in the House to
which they belong.

Matters may go smoothly enough when one House asks the other to punish
a member who is offensive to a majority of its own body; but how will it
be when, upon a pretence of insulted dignity, demands are made of
this House to expel a member who happens to run counter to its party
predilections, or other demands which it may not be so agreeable to
grant? It could never have been designed by the Constitution of the
United States to expose the two Houses to such temptations to collision,
or to extend so far the discretionary power which was given to either
House to punish its own members for the violation of its rules and
orders. Discretion has been said to be the law of the tyrant, and when
exercised under the color of the law, and under the influence of party
dictation, it may and will become a terrible and insufferable despotism.

This House, however, it would seem, from the unmistakable tendency of
its proceedings, takes a different view from that which I deliberately
entertain in common with many others.

So far as public interests or constitutional rights are involved, I have
now exhausted my means of defence. I may, then, be allowed to take a
more personal view of the question at issue. The further prosecution of
this subject, in the shape it has now assumed, may not only involve my
friends, but the House itself, in agitations which might be unhappy
in their consequences to the country. If these consequences could be
confined to myself individually, I think I am prepared and ready to meet
them, here or elsewhere; and when I