in which all public agents perform the duties assigned to them by law.  To be effective these inquiries must often be confidential.  They may result in the collection of truth or of falsehood, or they may be incomplete and may require further prosecution.  To maintain that the President can exercise no discretion as to the time in which the matters thus collected shall be promulgated or in respect to the character of the information obtained would deprive him at once of the means of performing one of the most salutary duties of his office.  An inquiry might be arrested at its first stage and the officers whose conduct demanded investigation may be enabled to elude or defeat it.  To require from the Executive the transfer of this discretion to a coordinate branch of the Government is equivalent to the denial of its possession by him and would render him dependent upon that branch in the performance of a duty purely executive.

Nor can it be a sound position that all papers, documents, and information of every description which may happen by any means to come into the possession of the President or of the heads of Departments must necessarily be subject to the call of the House of Representatives merely because they relate to a subject of the deliberations of the House, although that subject may be within the sphere of its legitimate powers.  It can not be that the only test is whether the information relates to a legitimate subject of deliberation.  The Executive Departments and the citizens of this country have their rights and duties as well as the House of Representatives, and the maxim that the rights of one person or body are to be so exercised as not to impair those of others is applicable in its fullest extent to this question.  Impertinence or malignity may seek to make the Executive Departments the means of incalculable and irremediable injury to innocent parties by throwing into them libels most foul and atrocious.  Shall there be no discretionary authority permitted to refuse to become the instruments of such malevolence?

And although information comes through a proper channel to an executive officer it may often be of a character to forbid its being made public.  The officer charged with a confidential inquiry, and who reports its result under the pledge of confidence which his appointment implies, ought not to be exposed individually to the resentment of those whose conduct may be impugned by the information he collects.  The knowledge that such is to be the consequence will inevitably prevent the performance of duties of that character, and thus the Government will be deprived of an important means of investigating the conduct of its agents.