of liberty, growing more and more enlightened and more and more vigorous from age to age, has been battering, for centuries, against the solid butments of the feudal system.  To this end, all that could be gained from the imprudence, snatched from the weakness, or wrung from the necessities of crowned heads, has been carefully gathered up, secured, and hoarded, as the rich treasures, the very jewels of liberty.  To this end, popular and representative right has kept up its warfare against prerogative, with various success; sometimes writing the history of a whole age in blood, sometimes witnessing the martyrdom of Sidneys and Russells, often baffled and repulsed, but still gaining, on the whole, and holding what it gained with a grasp which nothing but the complete extinction of its own being could compel it to relinquish.  At length, the great conquest over executive power, in the leading western states of Europe, has been accomplished.  The feudal system, like other stupendous fabrics of past ages, is known only by the rubbish which it has left behind it.  Crowned heads have been compelled to submit to the restraints of law, and the PEOPLE, with that intelligence and that spirit which make their voice resistless, have been able to say to prerogative, “Thus far shalt thou come, and no farther.”  I need hardly say, Sir, that into the full enjoyment of all which Europe has reached only through such slow and painful steps we sprang at once, by the Declaration of Independence, and by the establishment of free representative governments; governments borrowing more or less from the models of other free states, but strengthened, secured, improved in their symmetry, and deepened in their foundation, by those great men of our own country whose names will be as familiar to future times as if they were written on the arch of the sky.

Through all this history of the contest for liberty, executive power has been regarded as a lion which must be caged.  So far from being the object of enlightened popular trust, so far from being considered the natural protector of popular right, it has been dreaded, uniformly, always dreaded, as the great source of its danger.

And now, Sir, who is he, so ignorant of the history of liberty, at home and abroad; who is he, yet dwelling in his contemplations among the principles and dogmas of the Middle Ages; who is he, from whose bosom all original infusion of American spirit has become so entirely evaporated and exhaled, that he shall put into the mouth of the President of the United States the doctrine that the defence of liberty naturally results to executive power, and is its peculiar duty?  Who is he, that, generous and confiding towards power where it is most dangerous, and jealous only of those who can restrain it,—­who is he, that, reversing the order of the state, and upheaving the base, would poise the pyramid of the political system upon its apex?  Who is he, that, overlooking with contempt the guardianship of the representatives