years of its continuance, its directors may divide among the stockholders any portion of the capital which they may have withdrawn from active operation. The remaining sections are only such as are formal and necessary; one continues the acts of Congress connected with the bank, such as those providing for forging its notes, and the other requires the acceptance of this bill by the bank in order to give it validity and effect.

Such, Mr. President, are the provisions of this bill. They are few and simple.

1. The bank is to be continued for six years.

2. The deposits are to be restored after the 1st of July.

3. Congress is to be at perfect liberty to create any new bank, at any time after March, 1836.

4. The directors, in order to wind up their concerns, may, three years before the six years expire, begin to divide the capital among the stockholders.

Mr. President, this is the measure which I propose; and it is my settled belief, that, if we cannot carry this, we can carry nothing.

I have thus, Sir, stated my opinions, and discharged my duty. I see the country laboring and struggling and panting under an enormous political evil. I propose a remedy which I am sure will produce relief, if it be adopted, and which seems to me most likely to obtain support. And now, Sir, I put it to every member of Congress, how he can resist this measure, unless by proposing another and a better. Who, among the agents and servants of the people assembled in these houses, is prepared, in the present distressed state of the country, to say, that he will oppose every thing, and propose nothing? For one, Sir, I can only say, that I have been driven to this proposition by an irresistible impulse of obligation to the country. If I had been suddenly called to my great reckoning in another world, I should have felt that one duty was neglected, if I had had no measure to recommend, no expedient to propose, no hope to hold out to this suffering community.

As to the success of this bill, Sir, or any other, I have only to repeat what I have so often said, that every thing rests with the people themselves. In the distracted state of the public counsels, any measure of relief can only be obtained by the decisive demand of the public will.

By an exercise of executive power, which I believe to be illegal, and which all must see to have been injurious, by an unrelenting adherence to the measure which has thus been adopted, in spite of all consequences, and by the force of those motives which influence men to support the measure, though they entirely disapprove it, the country is brought to a condition such as it never before witnessed, and which it cannot long bear. But it is not a condition for despair. Nothing will ruin the country, if the people themselves will undertake its safety; and nothing can save it, if they leave that safety in any hands but their own. Would to God, Sir, that I could draw around me all these twelve millions of people! Would to God that I could speak audibly to every independent elector in the whole land! I would not say to them, vainly and arrogantly, that their safety and happiness require the adoption of any measure recommended by me. But I would say to them, with the sincerest conviction that ever animated man's heart, that their safety and happiness do require their own prompt and patriotic attention to the public concerns, their own honest devotion to the welfare of the state. I would say to them, that neither this measure, nor any measure, can be adopted, except by the cogent and persisting action of popular opinion. I would say to them, that the public revenues cannot be restored to their accustomed custody, that they cannot be again placed under the control of Congress, that the violation of law cannot be redressed, but by manifestations, not to be mistaken, of public sentiment. I would say to them, that the Constitution and the laws, their own rights and their own happiness, all depend on themselves; and if they esteem these of any value, if they were not too dearly bought by the blood of their fathers, if they be an inheritance fit to be transmitted to their posterity, I would beseech them, I would beseech them, to come now to their salvation.

THE PRESIDENTIAL PROTEST.*

MR. PRESIDENT,I feel the magnitude of this question. We are coming to a vote which cannot fail to produce important effects on the character of the Senate and the character of the government.

Unhappily, Sir, the Senate finds itself involved in a controversy with the President of the United States; a man who has rendered most distinguished services to his country, who has hitherto possessed a degree of popular favor perhaps never exceeded, and whose honesty of motive and integrity of purpose are still admitted by those who maintain that his administration has fallen into lamentable errors.

On some of the interesting questions in regard to which the President and Senate hold opposite opinions, the more popular branch of the legislature concurs with the executive. It is not to be concealed that the Senate is engaged against imposing odds. It can sustain itself only by its own prudence and the justice of its cause. It has no patronage by which to secure friends; it can raise up no advocates through the dispensation of favors, for it has no favors to dispense. Its very constitution, as a body whose members are elected for a long term, is capable of being rendered obnoxious, and is daily made the subject of opprobrious remark. It is already denounced as independent of the people, and aristocratic. Nor is it, like the other house, powerful in its numbers; not being, like that, so large as that its members come constantly in direct and extensive contact with the whole people. Under these disadvantages, Sir, which,

A Speech delivered in the Senate of the United States, on the 7th of May, 1834, on the President's Protest.

See note to page 47.

we may be assured, will be pressed and urged to the utmost length, there is but one course for us. The Senate must stand on its rendered reasons. It must put forth the grounds of its proceedings, and it must then rely on the intelligence and patriotism of the people to carry it through the contest.

As an individual member of the Senate, it gives me great pain to be engaged in such a conflict with the executive government. The occurrences of the last session are fresh in the recollection of all of us; and having felt it to be my duty, at that time, to give my cordial support to highly important measures of the administration, I ardently hoped that nothing might occur to place me afterwards in an attitude of opposition. In all respects, and in every way, it would have been far more agreeable to me to find nothing in the measures of the executive government which I could not cheerfully support. The present occasion of difference has not been sought or made by me. It is thrust upon me, in opposition to strong opinions and wishes, on my part not concealed. The interference with the public deposits dispelled all hope of continued concurrence with the administration, and was a measure so uncalled for, so unnecessary, and, in my judgment, so illegal and indefensible, that, with whatever reluctance it might be opposed by me, opposition was unavoidable.

The paper before us has grown out of this interference. It is a paper which cannot be treated with indifference. The doctrines which it advances, the circumstances which have attended its transmission to the Senate, and the manner in which the Senate may now dispose of it, will form a memorable era in the history of the government. We are either to enter it on our journals, concur in its sentiments, and submit to its rebuke, or we must answer it, with the respect due to the chief magistrate, but with such animadversion on its doctrines as they deserve, and with the firmness imposed upon us by our public duties.

I shall proceed, then, Sir, to consider the circumstances which gave rise to this Protest; to examine the principles which it attempts to establish; and to compare those principles with the Constitution and the laws.

On the 28th day of March, the Senate adopted a resolution declaring that, "in the late executive proceedings in relation to the public revenue, the President had assumed a power not conferred by the Constitution and laws, but in derogation of both." In that resolution I concurred.

It is not a direct question, now again before us, whether the President really had assumed such illegal power; that point is decided, so far as the Senate ever can decide it. But the Protest denies that, supposing the President to have assumed such illegal power, the Senate could properly pass the resolution; or, what is the same thing, it denies that the Senate could, in this way, express any opinion about it. It denies that the Senate has any right, by resolution, in this or any other case, to express disapprobation of the President's conduct, let that conduct be what it may; and this, one of the leading doctrines of the Protest, I propose to consider. But as I concurred in the resolution of the 28th of March, and did not trouble the Senate, at that time, with any statement of my own reasons, I will avail myself of this opportunity to explain, shortly, what those reasons

were.

In the first place, then, I have to say, that I did not vote for the resolution on the mere ground of the removal of Mr. Duane from the office of Secretary of the Treasury. Although I disapprove of the removal altogether, yet the power of removal does exist in the President, according to the established construction of the Constitution; and therefore, although in a particular case it may be abused, and, in my opinion, was abused in this case, yet its exercise cannot be justly said to be an assumption or usurpation. We must all agree that Mr. Duane is out of office. He has, therefore, been removed by a power constitutionally competent to remove him, whatever may be thought of the exercise of that power under the circumstances of the

case.

If, then, the act of removing the Secretary be not the assumption of power which the resolution declares, in what is that assumption found? Before giving a precise answer to this inquiry, allow me to recur to some of the principal previous

events.

At the end of the last session of Congress, the public moneys of the United States were still in their proper place. That place was fixed by the law of the land, and no power of change was conferred on any other human being than the Secretary of the Treasury. On him the power of change was conferred, to be exercised by himself, if emergency should arise, and to be exercised for reasons which he was bound to lay before Con