And this matchless conglomeration of incoherent absurdities was delivered, Mr. President, before an assemblage, every man of whom was probably conversant with the authorities and decisions that have consistently placed the brand of judicial condemnation upon this frenzied exposition of executive sovereignty.

This demonstrates, Mr. President, that the entire trouble arises from the fact that the Constitution is being perverted upon the grant of executive power. Article II of the Constitution says the executive power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America. This does not vest executive power in any greater degree than Article I vests legislative power when it says that all legislative powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States, or than Article III vests judicial power except in the Supreme Court of the United States.

I plant myself upon the proposition that the President derives no authority whatever from this clause. Nearly three-quarters of a century ago the greatest political philosophers who ever illustrated the pages of American history settled before this body this contention so that it has been considered a constitutional axiom until the present day. This provision of the Constitution simply relates to the distribution of governmental functions and can not be considered in the light of a grant.

As luminous a constitutional argument as Webster ever made was upon this precise point. The President must derive his authority from the subsequent provisions of the instrument that contain the grant, and the entire grant of power, and which are not in the slightest degree enlarged by the clause that I have quoted. His school of disciples evidently think that I am wrong upon this point and are bewildering the mind of the rising generation upon this proposition. If we were to pass a law here to-day reposing in the President a governmental function beyond the specifications of the Constitution and not necessary for the exercise of any power contained in the specifications, the enactment would be void. Now, if the law would be void, what power has the President without the sanction of law to trespass beyond the confines of his prerogative? The President is either the executive officer of the Government, vested with unlimited executive functions, or he is the Executive acting under special and delegated powers. Which is he? Is he the general executive agent of the people, or their immediate representative, as was once claimed by one of his predecessors who also had an erroneous conception of his prerogative, or is he a special agent who shall look to his commission and credentials for his authority? There are unlimited executive acts performed by monarchical rulers, the exercise of which the framers of the Constitution never intended to repose in the President, and therefore they circumscribed his functions.

I am aware that persons who are not familiar with the source of organic power are losing sight of fundamental distinctions and are looking to results and not instrumentalities. I am not surprised at this view,

but I am surprised that any men occupying the highest positions in the Government and instructors and text writers upon constitutional law should at this hour justify a doctrine that strikes down at its very altar the oracle of our faith and substitutes for it a worship that is only temporary and that can not possibly continue and endure. The day will come, Mr. President, I predict it — it is bound to come — when this illusion will disappear, when the people will retrace their steps, and as they flee from the pagan temple they will bear upon their shoulders the ark of the covenant and the scroll of the ancient law.

FROM A SPEECH OF REPRESENTATIVE TOWNE 1

It is, I take it, well within the province of a member of this popular representative branch of the National Legislature to examine and, within the limits of the decencies and proprieties of parliamentary discussion, to criticise the official conduct of the President of the United States. The independence of the legislative branch of the Government and the responsibilities of the Executive Office justify and require this liberty of comment.

It is, in my deliberate opinion, a very serious matter, not only as related to pending and immediately prospective public questions, but as concerning the development of our institutions and the preservation of that wise balance of power among the coördinate branches of this Government to which so much importance was originally attached, that the present Chief Executive of the country is disposed to magnify and to personalize his great office and to exercise authority beyond not only the traditional but the legal and constitutional limitations of his place. [Applause from the Democratic side.] This is not the time or the occasion, sir, for anybody, and certainly not for one no more competent to the task than I can claim to be, to attempt anything like an analysis and final judgment upon the character and achievements of Theodore Roosevelt, as to whom future historians, as has been the case with his contemporaries, will undoubtedly differ radically among themselves. There will be panegyrists and detractors hereafter, as there are eulogists and faultfinders now. I shall attempt no ultimate judgment. I shall briefly, however, comment upon certain aspects of his character, and upon certain of his official performances, for the purpose of drawing what seems to me to be necessary and helpful conclusions. There are many things in the character and endowments of that remarkable man that I have admired. There are also, on the other hand, many things that, as a representative of the people in this great body, I feel justified in pronouncing to be of a nature to unfit him for a judicious, careful, just, and deliberate discharge of high executive functions, and under the impul

1 Congr. Record, June 11, 1906.

sion of which he has time and again gone beyond the legitimate boundaries of his authority. [Applause on the Democratic side.]

This tendency of the Chief Executive is a matter of common knowledge among members of both Houses of Congress and the representatives of the newspaper press who are stationed at the capital. It is a serious misfortune, as I view it, that the unusual vogue enjoyed by the President imposes upon Senators, Representatives, and correspondents a reticence in regard to these excesses of Executive authority that would not under ordinary conditions be observed. In my opinion we ought to be honest with the people of the United States, and tell them frankly what everybody in this House knows, what every member of the Senate knows, and what everybody in the press galleries knows, that the President of the United States endeavors, so far as an almost phenomenal activity and endurance will permit, to embrace within himself and to exercise at once almost all of the powers and prerogatives of the three coördinate branches of this Government. Moreover, he seems to regard the high and solemn duties of his office not only as in the nature of personal assets of his own, but as appropriate occasion for the exercise of an indeliberate and whimsical disposition apparently as little regardful of the momentousness and significance of his action as that of a boy occupied with his toys.

The reorganization of the Army has emphasized the military aspects of the Presidency. The President's relation to the Army is not much different from that sustained by the Emperor William to the German army. It is notorious that promotions during the present administration have been made in a manner so harmful to the discipline of the service, and to so great a degree upon grounds of favoritism and personal preference, as to have become the subject of repeated and solicitous conference among men having knowledge of the situation and concerned with the preservation of the morale of the Army. The diplomatic service has fallen under the same influence. The Secretary of State, although himself a man of great ability and strong personality, has had many of his functions shorn. The President's relation to the general body of the service is much more intimate and direct than heretofore, and we have recently seen how, for the first time in American diplomacy, the President has referred to a high representative of the United States at a foreign court as "my ambassador." A similar personal dominance is asserted in the province of every Cabinet office, and everybody remembers the promulgation of the famous "order of silence" by which those high functionaries were forbidden to talk to reporters about their business, and directed to leave a monopoly of publicity to the head of the Government.

The civil-service rules have been made conveniently pliant to the personal and political exigencies of the Chief Executive, and, although in former days that gentleman filled a great place in the movement for

civil-service reform, the records show that the rules have been set aside during his administration about four times as often as they were during his predecessor's term. The most important considerations of public policy are constantly and customarily made subservient to the personal feelings of the Chief Magistrate. The evidence, for example, to which everybody had access, disclosed that one of his Cabinet officers, some time since resigned, had been engaged, while occupying a high official position with a great railroad system, in repeated violations of the interstate-commerce law; but the fact of his close official and personal relation to the President not only relieved him from prosecution or censure, but actually won for him an official certificate of innocence in direct contradiction of even his own confession.

In February, 1905, Admiral Walker testified that he and other members of the Panama Canal Commission, on the President's express authorization, charged and received, in addition to their regular compensation, director's fees for attending the meetings of the board of directors of the Panama Railroad. Expenses far beyond those that have scandalized former administrations are incurred by this administration with a gay and easy nonchalance seemingly justified by the entire lack of subsequent public criticism. Whereas wide and unfavorable comment was made upon one of his predecessors for too frequent use of one Government vessel, very little is now said about the employment by the President of the United States of the Sylph, the Dolphin, and the Mayflower together. White House repairs are undertaken and carried out apparently with as little hesitancy as that with which a prosperous farmer would build a wood shed; and $750,000 is spent in alleged increase of the facilities and attractions of the Executive Mansion, where no living architect can possibly see where there was opportunity to disburse more than a seventh of that sum to produce the very unhandsome results. Some of these matters to which I have referred thus cursorily may seem somewhat trivial. The catalogue is not exhaustive even of important considerations. I cite these few only as illustrative of that persistent and irrepressible tendency to personalize his office, to regard it as an appendage to his will, which characterizes the present occupant of that great place.

It is, moreover, inevitable that a man possessing the characteristics of the President should trench upon the traditional and constitutional restrictions of his authority. This natural inclination is unfortunately reenforced by certain considerations growing out of the political conditions of our time. In the first place, there is a necessary reaction upon the methods of our Executive Department by the unavoidable secrecy and arbitrariness with which the affairs of our colonial possessions are conducted. It is yet too soon for us fully to appreciate the irreparable damage done to our peculiar institutions by the rash assumption of the

dangers of colonial government. From the commencement of the departure in our experience I have felt the deepest concern for its effect upon that constitutional balance among the different departments of the Government upon which our elder statesmen placed so much stress, and upon whose permanent preservation, as I believe, rests to a very large degree the perpetuity of civil liberty in this country. In the course of a speech on our Philippine policy in the Senate of the United States, on the 28th of January, 1901, I used the following language:

This policy favors the growth of the executive department of the Government at the expense of the other, and is opposed to democratic principles. It involves singleness of authority, celerity of action, secrecy of purpose, irresponsibility; all contrary to the necessary methods of self-government. It begets a superficial admiration for "strong government," and "simple government," which are absolutely inconsistent with liberty. Let me again quote words of wisdom from the speech of Daniel Webster, already cited:

"Nothing is more deceptive or more dangerous than the pretense of a desire to simplify government. The simplest governments are despotisms; the next simplest, limited monarchies; but all republics, all governments of law, must impose numerous limitations and qualifications of authority, and give many positive and many qualified rights. In other words, they must be subject to rule and regulation. This is the very essence of free political institutions.

"The spirit of liberty is, indeed, a bold and fearless spirit; but it is also a sharp sighted spirit; it is a cautious, sagacious, discriminating, far-seeing intelligence; it is jealous of encroachment, jealous of power, jealous of man. It demands checks; it seeks for guards; it insists on securities; it intrenches itself behind strong defenses, and fortifies itself with all possible care against the assaults of ambition and passion.

"It does not trust the amiable weaknesses of human nature, and, therefore, it will not permit power to overstep its prescribed limits, though benevolence, good intent, and patriotic purpose come along with it. Neither does it satisfy itself with flashy and temporary resistance to illegal authority. Far otherwise. It seeks for duration and permanence. It looks before and after; and, building on the experience of ages which are past, it labors diligently for the benefit of ages to come. This is the nature of constitutional liberty, and this is our liberty, if we will rightly understand and preserve it. Every free government is necessarily complicated, because all such governments establish restraints, as well on the power of government itself as on that of individuals.”

A president can not be at one and the same time a constitutional chief magistrate and an autocrat a President in America, with imperial powers in the Orient.

There is no question in my mind, sir, that the reaction of our absolute government in our distant possessions is partly responsible for the tendency toward Executive excess, at which all close students of our institutions are now gravch concerned Bat there is another consideration which reenforces the one just mentioned and the natural characteristics of the President. I refer to the phenomenal popular majority by which the present Chief Magistrate was chosen in the election of 1004. The