and inconsistent with the requirement that appointments should be made with the advice and consent of the Senate.  The debate soon became heated.  “Let us look around at this moment,” said Jackson of Georgia, “and see the progress we are making toward venality and corruption.  We already hear the sounding title of Highness and Most Honorable trumpeted in our ears, which, ten years since, would have exalted a man to a station as high as Haman’s gibbet.”  Page of Virginia was ablaze with indignation.  “Good God!” he exclaimed.  “What, authorize in a free republic, by law, too, by your first act, the exertion of a dangerous royal prerogative in your Chief Magistrate!” Gerry, in remarks whose oblique criticism upon arrangements at the President’s house was perfectly well understood, dwelt upon the possibility that the President might be guided by some other criterion than discharge of duty as the law directs.  “Perhaps the officer is not good natured enough; he makes an ungraceful bow, or does it left leg foremost; this is unbecoming in a great officer at the President’s levee.  Now, because he is so unfortunate as not to be so good a dancer as he is a worthy officer, he must be removed.”  These rhetorical flourishes, which are significant of the undercurrent of sentiment, hardly do justice to the general quality of the debate which was marked by legal acuteness on both sides.  Madison pressed home the sensible argument that the President could not be held to responsibility unless he could control his subordinates.  “And if it should happen that the officers connect themselves with the Senate, they may mutually support each other, and for want of efficacy reduce the power of the President to a mere vapor; in which case, his responsibility would be annihilated and the expectation of it unjust.”

The debate lasted for several days, but Madison won by a vote of 34 to 20 in committee, in favor of retaining the clause.  On second thought, however, and probably after consultation with the little group of constructive statesmen who stood behind the scenes, he decided that it might be dangerous to allow the President’s power of removal to rest upon a legislative grant that might be revoked.  When the report from the committee of the whole was taken up in the House, a few days later, Benson of New York proposed that the disputed clause should be omitted and the language of the bill should be worded so as to imply that the power of removal was in the President.  Madison accepted the suggestion, and the matter was thus settled.  The point was covered by providing that the chief clerk of the Department should take charge “whenever the principal officer shall be removed from office by the President.”  The clause got through the Senate by the casting vote of the Vice-President, and a similar provision was inserted, without further contest, in all the acts creating the executive departments.  It is rather striking evidence of the Utopian expectations which could then be indulged that Daniel Carroll of Maryland was persistent in urging that the existence of the office should be limited to a few years, “under a hope that a time would come when the United States would be disengaged from the necessity of supporting a Secretary of Foreign Affairs.”  Although Gerry and others expressed sympathy with the motion it was voted down without a division.