Mr. President, the first power granted to Congress by the Constitution is the power to lay taxes; the second, the power to borrow money on the credit of the United States.  Now, Sir, where does the executive find its authority, in or through any department, to borrow money without authority of Congress?  This proceeding appears to me wholly illegal, and reprehensible in a very high degree.  It may be said that it is not true that this money is borrowed on the credit of the United States, but that it is borrowed on the credit of the Post-Office Department.  But that would be mere evasion.  The department is but a name.  It is an office, and nothing more.  The banks have not lent this money to any officer.  If Congress should abolish the whole department to-morrow, would the banks not expect the United States to replace this borrowed money?  The money, then, is borrowed on the credit of the United States, an act which Congress alone is competent to authorize.  If the Post-Office Department may borrow money, so may the War Department and the Navy Department.  If half a million may be borrowed, ten millions may be borrowed.  What, then, if this transaction shall be justified, is to hinder the executive from borrowing money to maintain fleets and armies, or for any other purpose, at his pleasure, without any authority of law?  Yet even this, according to the doctrine of the Protest, we have no right to complain of.  We have no right to declare that an executive department has violated the Constitution and broken the law, by borrowing money on the credit of the United States.  Nor could we make a similar declaration, if we were to see the executive, by means of this borrowed money, enlisting armies and equipping fleets.  And yet, Sir, the President has found no difficulty, heretofore, in expressing his opinions, in a paper not called for by the exercise of any official duty, upon the conduct and proceedings of the two houses of Congress.  At the commencement of this session, he sent us a message, commenting on the land bill which the two houses passed at the end of the last session.  That bill he had not approved, nor had he returned it with objections.  Congress was dissolved; and the bill, therefore, was completely dead, and could not be revived.  No communication from him could have the least possible effect as an official act.  Yet he saw fit to send a message on the subject, and in that message he very freely declares his opinion that the bill which had passed both houses began with an entire subversion of every one of the compacts by which the United States became possessed of their Western domain; that one of its provisions was in direct and undisguised violation of the pledge given by Congress to the States; that the Constitution provides that these compacts shall be untouched by the legislative power, which can only make needful rules and regulations; and that all beyond that is an assumption of undelegated power.