myself with those who are for refusing all supplies, even under the present circumstances of the war in which we are engaged; while I maintain that some provision must be made for the support of our armies and the defence of our country, as long as a foreign nation is in arms against us, declining all overtures of peace; I must also disavow all sympathy with those who proclaim their intention to sanction all the measures of the Administration, blindly and implicitly, and to vote for whatever amount of money, and whatever number of men, they may see fit to demand. I cannot regard such a course as either called for by patriotism or consistent with principle. Still less do I acquiesce in the doctrine, which would impose silence upon all who cannot approve the conduct and policy of the Administration. I have no faith in the idea that it is necessary for us to hold our peace, in order that the Executive may make peace with Mexico. I believe, on the contrary, that, if this war is ever to be brought to an end, it is time for those who desire that consummation, to speak out in language not to be misunderstood.

Indeed, Sir, I know of nothing of less favorable augury for the destinies of our country, than the disposition which has been manifested by the Administration and its friends to stifle inquiry, to suppress discussion, to overawe every thing like free comment and criticism, in regard to the war in which we are now involved.

When any one of the vessels of our Navy meets with a disaster at sea, is wrecked in a gale, or stranded on a lee-shore, a court of inquiry is forthwith instituted as to the circumstances of the catastrophe. Her officers demand it. The Government exact it. It is considered due to the country, as well as to all concerned, that it should be clearly seen whether there has been any carelessness, or any culpableness, on the part of any of those to whom she has been intrusted; and, if so, who is the guilty party.

But now, when the ship of State has been involved in the deepest disaster which can befall her, when she has been arrested on that track of tranquil liberty for which she was designed, and has been plunged into the vortex of foreign war, we find her commander and his officers and pilots all denouncing

any investigation of their conduct, and imperiously demanding of the people and their representatives that they shall rest satisfied with a one-sided, ex parte vindication of their acts and motives. All denial, all doubt, of the supreme wisdom and consummate justice of their conduct is boldly condemned from the very quarter-deck itself, not without ominous glances at the yardarm; and those who honestly entertain misgivings as to their. course, are called upon to close their lips, or to submit to the base imputation of "giving aid and comfort to the enemy."

Sir, if this be an evidence of the progress of Democracy, it can only be of that sort of Democracy which is to find its legiti mate goal in despotism. If such a doctrine is to receive the sanction of this House, we had better resort to the old custom of the British Parliament, and send our Speaker, at the opening of every Congress, to the President, to beg that he will graciously grant to his most faithful Commons the privilege of free debate, Nay, we might as well resort at once to the old Roman practice, in time of war, and invest our Chief Magistrate with the irresponsible prerogative of the Dictatorship, and leave him alone to take care that the Republic receives no detriment.

We are gravely told that we may question the policy and justice of an administration in time of peace as much as we please; but that when we are engaged in war, all such ques tioning is unpatriotic and treasonable. So, then, Mr. Chairman, if the rulers of our Republic shall content themselves with some ordinary measure of misconduct, with some cheap and vulgar misdemeanor, the people may arraign and impeach them to their heart's content. But let them only lift themselves boldly to the perpetration of a flagrant crime, let them only dare to commit the very worst act of which they are capable, and they are to find their impunity in the very enormity of their conduct, and are to be safely screened behind the mountain of their own misdoing!

This, Sir, is the length to which the President has gone in his message. This is the length to which gentlemen have followed him on this floor. Be it, say they, that this war is, in your judgment, wholly unjustifiable; be it, that it has been commenced by Executive assumption and usurpation; be it, that it is prose

cuted in a manner utterly inconsistent with the Constitution of our country; yet, as it is a war, and for the very reason that it is this monstrous wrong, you must not open your lips; you must not express or intimate opposition or discontent; you must not inquire, discuss, or do any thing but vote supplies for its vigorous prosecution. The enemy will hear you, and will derive "aid and comfort" from your conduct, and you yourselves will be guilty of treason.

Sir, I say, let the enemy hear―let the enemy hear, and let the world hear, all that we say and all that we think on this subject, rather than our rights of free discussion shall be thus wrenched from us, and rather than the principles of our Constitution and the spirit of our government shall thus be subverted and crushed.

Mr. Chairman, I can find no words strong enough to express my utter reprobation and condemnation of this abhorrent doctrine. The doctrine that, whenever war exists, whether produced by the acts of others or by our own act, the Representatives of the people are to resign all discretion and discrimination as to the measures by which, and the objects for which, it is to. be carried on! The doctrine that, in time of war, we are bound by the obligations of patriotism to throw the reins on the neck of Executive power, and let it prance and plunge according to its own wild and ungoverned impulses! I have heard before of standing by one's country right or wrong, and much as we may scorn such a sentiment as a general principle, there is at least one sense in which no man is at liberty to revolt from it. As a maxim of defence, in time of danger, its propriety cannot be disputed. But whence came this doctrine that we are to stand by the Executive, right or wrong? From what soil of Democracy has it sprung? In what part of our Republican history do you find the germ from which it has now so suddenly burst forth?

Sir, the Democracy of other days is not without a voice on this subject; a voice of warning, a voice of rebuke, which I trust will not be heard in vain. Every body will remember a celebrated controversy which occurred between Alexander Hamilton and James Madison in the year 1793, on the subject of the Proclamation of Neutrality. But every one is not familiar,

perhaps, with the principles brought under consideration in that masterly discussion. I beg leave to refresh the memories of gentlemen with a few paragraphs from the papers of James Madison on that occasion:

"Every just view that can be taken of this subject admonishes the public of the necessity of a rigid adherence to the simple, the received, and the fundamental doctrine of the Constitution, that the power to declare war, including the power of judging of the causes of war, is fully and exclusively vested in the Legislature; that the Executive has no right, in any case, to decide the question whether there is or is not cause for declaring war; that the right of convening and informing Congress, whenever such a question seems to call for a decision, is all the right which the Constitution has deemed requisite or proper; and that for such, more than for any other contingency, this right was specially given to the Executive.

"In no part of the Constitution is more wisdom to be found than in the clause which confides the question of war or peace to the legislative, and not to the Executive department. Besides the objection to such a mixture of heterogeneous powers, the trust and the temptation would be too great for any one man; not such as nature may offer as the prodigy of many centuries, but such as may be expected in the ordinary successions of magistracy. War is in fact the true nurse of Executive aggrandizement. In war, a physical force is to be created, and it is the Executive will which is to direct it. In war, the public treasures are to be unlocked, and it is the Executive hand which is to dispense them. In war, the honors and emoluments of office are to be multiplied, and it is the Executive patronage under which they are to be enjoyed. It is in war, finally, that laurels are to be gathered, and it is the Executive brow they are to encircle. The strongest passions and most dangerous weaknesses of the human breast-ambition, avarice, vanity, the honorable or venial love of fame-are all in conspiracy against the desire and duty of peace.

"Hence it has grown into an axiom, that the Executive is the department of power most distinguished by its propensity to war; hence it is the practice of all States, in proportion as they are free, to disarm this propensity of its influence.

"As the best praise, then, that can be pronounced on an Executive magistrate is, that he is the friend of peace- —a praise that rises in its value as there may be a known capacity to shine in war—so it must be one of the most sacred duties of a free people to mark the first omen in the society of principles that may stimulate the hopes of other magistrates of another propensity, to intrude into questions on which its gratification depends. If a free people be a wise people also, they will not forget that the danger of surprise can never be so great as when the advocates for the prerogative of war can sheathe it in a symbol of peace.

"The Constitution has manifested a similar prudence in refusing to the Executive the sole power of making peace. The trust, in this instance, also, would be too great for the wisdom, and the temptations too strong for the virtue, of a single citizen.”

And there is another paragraph in one of the same papers of infinitely more significant import:

"Those who are to conduct a war, cannot, in the nature of things, be proper or safe judges, whether a war ought to be commenced, continued or concluded. They

are barred from the latter functions by a great principle in free government, analogous to that which separates the sword from the purse, or the power of executing from the power of enacting laws."

Much has been said, in the course of this debate, Mr. Chairman, about the doctrines of old-fashioned Federalism. Now here, Sir, are the doctrines of old-fashioned Democracy, in the very language of one of its ablest and most honored masters. And how strangely do they contrast with the manifestoes of that modern brood, which boast themselves so vaingloriously of their borrowed plumes! In which one of these golden sentences of James Madison do you find any justification of the idea, that the Executive department of the government is to be implicitly trusted in time of war, and that the vigilance of Congress is to suffer itself to be lulled asleep by the insipid opiate of a President's message? What can be more emphatic than the declaration, that "those who are to conduct a war cannot, in the nature of things, be proper or safe judges whether a war ought to be commenced, continued, or concluded?" Who can read these paragraphs without being deeply impressed with the sentiment which pervades them, that if the true spirit of Democracy calls upon us ever to be jealous, with an exceeding jealousy, of Executive power, it is when that power has been armed with the fearful prerogative of war, and when, as now, that prerogative is masked behind "a symbol of peace?" If the democratic sensibilities of James Madison were startled and shocked, when George Washington, that "prodigy of many centuries," as he well entitled him, thought fit to forestall the deliberations of Congress by issuing a proclamation of neutrality, what would he have said had he lived to see a President, "such as may be expected in the ordinary successions of magistracy," not merely involving the country in war by his own acts, but proceeding to stigmatize as traitors all who may think fit to inquire into the causes of the war, or to judge for themselves whether it ought to be continued or concluded?

But we have been told, Mr. Chairman, that whoever else may undertake to cavil at the course of the administration in rela tion to this war, it does not belong to those who voted for it to do so. We were elegantly and courteously informed, some