of troops at the polls, to repeal laws authorizing
the appointment of supervisors and special deputy marshals for
elections, and to make it a crime for an officer of the army to
aid in keeping the peace at the polls on election days were brought
forward and their enactment into laws demanded. I spoke on the
8th and on the 10th of April, 1880, against inhibiting the use of
the army at the polls and restricting the President's power to keep
the peace at elections when riots and disorder prevailed, and on
March 18th, and again on the 11th of June, 1880, in opposition to
a bill intended to repeal existing laws relating to the use of
deputy marshals at elections. In these debates I sought to make
clear the power of the government to protect the voter in Federal
elections; to demonstrate the necessity for doing so; to show that
it was as important to have peace on election day at the polls as
on the other days of the year and at other places; that it was not
intended, and had never been the purpose, to use troops or supervisors
or deputy marshals to prevent a voter from voting for officers of
his choice, but only to secure him in that right; and that the
right to a peaceful election had always been sacredly maintained,
and for this purpose the army had been used in England and in all
countries where free elections had been held. I maintained that
the citizen was as much entitled to be protected in his right
peacefully and freely to exercise the elective franchise, as to be
protected in any other right, and that it was as much the duty and
as clearly within the power of the Federal Government to use, when
necessary, the army as a police force on an election day as to use
it on other days of the year to suppress riots and breaches of the
peace; and I further insisted that it was the duty of the United
States to protect its citizens at home as well as abroad in all
their constitutional rights.(12) I also showed that the coercive
policy of forcing legislation under threats of destroying the
government was not only indefensible, treasonable, and unpatriotic,
but wholly new. The precedents alleged to be found in the history
of the British Parliament were shown not to exist in fact; that
the farthest the English Parliament had ever gone was to refuse
subsidies to the Crown, the princes, or to maintain royalty, or to
vote supplies to carry on a foreign war not approved by the House
of Commons; that in no case had the life of the