to honor, but whom in attempting adequately to describe, I must fly to Mr. Burke, my constant refuge when eloquence is necessary a man who, to relieve the sufferings of the most distant nation, "put to the hazard his ease, his security, his interest, his power, even his darling popularity, for the benefit of a people whom he had never seen." How much more, then, for the inhabitants of his native country! Yet this is the man who has been censured and disavowed in the manner we have lately seen. Gentlemen, I have but a few more words to trouble you with: I take my leave of you with declaring that all this freedom which I have been endeavoring to assert is no more than the ancient freedom which belongs to our own inbred Constitution; I have not asked you to acquit Thomas Paine upon any new lights, or upon any principle but that of the law, which you are sworn to administer; my great object has been to inculcate that wisdom. and policy, which are the parents of the Government of Great Britain, forbid this jealous eye over her subjects; and that, on the contrary, they cry aloud in the language of the poet, adverted to by Lord Chatham on the memorable subject of America, unfortunately without effect. "Be to their faults a little blind, Engage the people by their affections, convince their reason, and they will be loyal from the only principle that can make loyalty sincere, vigorous, or rational,-a conviction that it is their truest interest, and that their government is for their good. Constraint is the natural parent of resistance, and a pregnant proof that reason is not on the side of those who use it. You must all remember Lucian's pleasant story; Jupiter and a countryman were walking together, conversing with great freedom and familiarity upon the subject of heaven and earth. The countryman listened with attention and acquiescence, while Jupiter strove only to convince him:-but happening to hint a doubt, Jupiter turned hastily around and threatened him with his thunder. "Ah! ah!" says the countryman, "now, Jupiter, I know that you are wrong; you are always wrong when you appeal to your thunder." This is the case with me I can reason with the people of England, but I cannot fight against the thunder of authority. Gentlemen, this is my defense of free opinions. With regard to myself, I am, and always have been, obedient and affectionate to the law; to that rule of action, as long as I exist, I shall ever do as I have done to-day, maintain the dignity of my high profession, and perform, as I understand them, all its important duties. VI-131 WILLIAM MAXWELL EVARTS (1818-) ILLIAM MAXWELL EVARTS was born in Boston, February 6th, 1818, and educated at Yale, where he graduated in 1837. Three years later he was admitted to the New York bar, where for nearly half a century he held a distinguished place. His knowledge of the principles of law and of constitutional government led to his selection as counsel for President Johnson at the impeachment trial in 1868. He conducted the defense with great ability, and, after the close of the trial, served as Attorney-General, from 1868 to 1869, in President Johnson's Cabinet. In 1872 he was counsel for the United States before the Geneva tribunal, and in 1877 he represented the Republican party before the Electoral Commission. He served four years as Secretary of State in the Hayes Cabinet (1877-81), and six years (1885-91) as United States Senator from New York. During this period, he was frequently discussed as a candidate for the Presidency, but he was much greater in law than in politics, and though he won great successes at the bar with apparent ease, his political successes were seemingly either wholly accidental or else a result of his greatness as a lawyer. As an orator, he was perhaps unduly celebrated for the length of his sentences; but however long they may be, they are seldom involved, and the easy fluidity of his style is well worth study. THE WEAKEST SPOT OF THE AMERICAN SYSTEM (From the Speech for the Defense at the Impeachment of President Johnson) THE HERE are in the Constitution but three barriers against the will of a majority of Congress within the terms of their authority. One is that it requires a two-thirds vote to expel a Member of either house; another that a two-thirds vote is necessary to pass a law over the objections of the President; and another, that a two-thirds vote of the Senate, sitting as a court for the trial of impeachment, is requisite to a sentence. And now how have these two last protections of the executive office disappeared from the Constitution in its practical working by the condition of parties that has given to one the firm possession by a three-fourths vote, I think in both houses, of the control of the action of each body of the Legislature? Reflect upon this. I do not touch upon the particular circumstance that the nonrestoration of the Southern States has left your numbers in both houses of Congress less than they might under other circumstances be. I do not calculate whether that absence diminishes or increases the disproportion that there would be. Possibly their presence might even aggravate the political majority which is thus arrayed and thus overrides practically all the calculations of the presidential protection through the guarantees of the Constitution; for, what do the two-thirds provisions mean? They mean that in a free country, where elections were diffused over a vast area, no Congressman having a constituency of over seventy or eighty thousand people, it was impossible to suppose that there would not be a somewhat equal division of parties, or impossible to suppose that the excitements and zeal of party could carry all the members of it into any extravagance. I do not call them extravagances in any sense of reproach; I merely speak of them as the extreme measures that parties in politics, and under whatever motives, may be disposed to adopt. Certainly, then, there is ground to pause and consider, before you bring to a determination this great struggle between the coordinate branches of the Government, this agitation and this conclusion in a certain event of the question whether the coordination of the Constitution can be preserved. Attend to these special circumstances and determine for yourselves whether, under these influences, it is best to urge a contest which must operate upon the framework of the Constitution and its future, unattended by any exceptions of a peculiar nature that govern the actual situation. Ah, that is the misery of human affairs, that the stress comes and has its consequence when the system is least prepared to receive it. It is the misery that disease, casual, circumstantial, invades the frame when health is depressed and the powers of the constitution to resist it are at the lowest ebb. It is that the gale rises and sweeps the ship to destruction when there is no sea-room for it and when it is upon a lee shore. And if concurrent with that danger to the good ship, her crew be short, if her helm be unsettled, if disorder begin to prevail, and there come to be a final struggle for the maintenance of mastery against the elements and over the only chances of safety, how wretched is the condition of that people whose fortunes are embarked in that ship of state! What other protection is there for the presidential office than these two-thirds guarantees of the Constitution that have disappeared? The Supreme Court placed there to determine, among the remarkable provinces of its jurisdiction, the lines of separation and of duty and of power, under our Constitution, between the Legislature and the President. Ah! under this evidence, received and rejected, the very effort of the President was, when the two-thirds majorities had urged the contest against him, to raise a case for the Supreme Court to decide; and then the Legislature, coming in by its special condition of impeachment, intercepts the effort and brings his head again within the mere power of Congress, where the two-thirds rule is equally ineffectual as between the parties to the contest. This is matter of grave import, of necessary consideration, which, with the people of this country, with watchful foreign nations, and in the eyes of history, will be one of the determining features of this great controversy; for great as is the question in the estimate of the managers, or of ourselves, or of the public intelligence of this people, of how great the power should be on one side or the other, with Congress or with the President, that question sinks into absolute insignificance compared with the greater and higher question, the question that has been in the Constitution, that has been in the minds of philosophers, of publicists, and of statesmen since it was founded, whether it was in the power of a written constitution to draw lines of separation and put up buttresses of defense between the co-ordinate branches of the Government. And with that question settled adversely with a determination that one can devour, and having the power, will devour the other, then the balances of the American Constitution are lost, and lost forever. Nobody can reinstate in paper what has once been struck down in fact. Mankind are governed by instances, not by resolutions. And then, indeed, there is placed before the people of this country, either despair at the theory of paper constitutions, which have been derided by many foreign statesmen, or else an attempt to establish new balances of power by which, the poise of the different departments being more firmly placed, one can be safe against the other. But who can be wiser than our fathers? Who |