Our duty seems to me clear as sunlight. We owe it to ourselves, we owe it to the people who sent us here, we owe it to posterity, to whom we have to transmit these republican institutions unimpaired, to look that duty boldly in the face. I know it is very hard to pronounce judgment in a case like this. The acts we are discussing are the acts of our President. We elected him, and we had hoped with cordiality to support his Administration from beginning to end. We would gladly exonerate him from all blame if we could; and yet our duty remains the same; and it is this duty that tests our metal. It is no great thing to watch and restrain within the Constitutional limits of his power an Executive to whom you are politically opposed. There is nothing brave, nothing to be proud of in that. But to watch with conscientious care that your friends in power do not encroach upon the rights and liberties of the people, arrogating to themselves illegitimate authority, that is the thing which marks the true and faithful guardian of the laws, the thing which distinguishes the patriot from the mere partisan. If I see the danger of usurpation looming up anywhere, it is in that blind and reckless party spirit which will complacently wink at and be ready to defend any wrong when perpetrated by a friend, which it would most violently denounce when merely attempted by a political opponent. While it is a hard, I say, therefore, it is a stern and a proud duty.
But this is not all. The Chief Magistrate, whose acts we now consider, is not only our President, and, as we have fallen into the habit of calling him, not only the official chief of our party; he is also a man who has well deserved of this Republic, whose name is identified with some of the heroic pages of our history, and whose fame, perhaps, is an object of somewhat tender solicitude to the American people. I, sir, would be the last man to be
