The next point to which I would call attention, is to be found in Art.  I., sect. 6, of the Constitution of the United States, the last clause of which runs thus:—­“No person holding any office under the United States shall be a member of either House during his continuance in office.”  This was probably one of the most extraordinary blunders such an able body of men as the framers of the Constitution ever made; and if their object was to guard against corruption, and the undue influence of the leading men of the country, it has most signally failed, as the Act before referred to, of February, 1853, fully testifies.  Only conceive the effect of excluding all the Cabinet and high functionaries from seats in the Lords and Commons; conceive the great statesmen of this country being obliged to hand over the introduction of most important measures, and the defence and explanation of them, to other hands.  On this point, Mr. Justice Story remarks:  “Thus, that open and public responsibility for measures, which properly belongs to the executive in all governments, especially in a republican government, as its greatest security and strength, is completely done away.  The executive is compelled to resort to secret and unseen influence,—­to private interviews and private arrangements,—­to accomplish its own appropriate purposes, instead of proposing and sustaining its own duties and measures by a bold and manly appeal to the nation in the face of its representatives.  One consequence of this state of things is, that there never can be traced home to the executive any responsibility for the measures which are planned and carried at its suggestion.  Another consequence will be—­if it has not yet been—­that measures will be adopted or defeated by private intrigues, political combinations, irresponsible recommendations, by all the blandishments of office, and all the deadening weight of silent patronage; ... ministers may conceal or evade any expression of their opinions.”

In charity it should be presumed that in all nations which possess anything worthy of the name of free institutions, the ablest men of the political majority constitute the Cabinet; and, by the enactment we are considering, all this talent is excluded from the councils of the nation, whereas all the talent of the Opposition may be there arrayed against their measures.  I confess it is beyond my penetration, to see how this can be reconciled to justice or common sense; in no one principle of their Government did they more completely ignore the wisdom and experience of the mother country, and in the object they had in view they appear to have most completely failed.  It is but fair to the democrats to say it is no act of theirs; they inherited the misfortune, and are likely to keep it, as it is one of the fundamental principles of their Constitution, and they have a salutary dread—­much to their praise—­of tinkering up any flaw they find in that document, lest in mending one hole