of high crimes and misdemeanors.  Before that tribunal the accused is confronted with his accusers, and may demand the privilege, which the justice of the common law secures to the humblest citizen, of a full, patient, and impartial inquiry into the facts, upon the testimony of witnesses rigidly cross-examined and deposing in the face of day.  If such a proceeding had been adopted toward me, unjust as I should certainly have regarded it, I should, I trust, have met with a becoming constancy a trial as painful as it would have been undeserved.  I would have manifested by a profound submission to the laws of my country my perfect faith in her justice, and, relying on the purity of my motives and the rectitude of my conduct, should have looked forward with confidence to a triumphant refutation in the presence of that country and by the solemn judgment of such a tribunal not only of whatever charges might have been formally preferred against me, but of all the calumnies of which I have hitherto been the unresisting victim.  As it is, I have been accused without evidence and condemned without a hearing.  As far as such proceedings can accomplish it, I am deprived of public confidence in the administration of the Government and denied even the boast of a good name—­a name transmitted to me from a patriot father, prized as my proudest inheritance, and carefully preserved for those who are to come after me as the most precious of all earthly possessions.  I am not only subjected to imputations affecting my character as an individual, but am charged with offenses against the country so grave and so heinous as to deserve public disgrace and disfranchisement.  I am charged with violating pledges which I never gave, and, because I execute what I believe to be the law, with usurping powers not conferred by law, and, above all, with using the powers conferred upon the President by the Constitution from corrupt motives and for unwarrantable ends.  And these charges are made without any particle of evidence to sustain them, and, as I solemnly affirm, without any foundation in truth.

Why is a proceeding of this sort adopted at this time?  Is the occasion for it found in the fact that having been elected to the second office under the Constitution by the free and voluntary suffrages of the people, I have succeeded to the first according to the express provisions of the fundamental law of the same people?  It is true that the succession of the Vice-President to the Chief Magistracy has never occurred before and that all prudent and patriotic minds have looked on this new trial of the wisdom and stability of our institutions with a somewhat anxious concern.  I have been made to feel too sensibly the difficulties of my unprecedented position not to know all that is intended to be conveyed in the reproach cast upon a President without a party.  But I found myself placed in this most responsible station by no usurpation or contrivance of my own.  I was called to it,