by statute upon statute, and by provision following provision, to define and limit official authority; to assign particular duties to particular public servants; to define those duties; to create penalties for their violation; to adjust accurately the responsibility of each agent with his own powers and his own duties; to establish the prevalence of equal rule; to make the law, as far as possible, every thing, and individual will, as far as possible, nothing;—­after all this, the astounding assertion rings in our ears, that, throughout the whole range of official agency, in its smallest ramifications as well as in its larger masses, there is but ONE RESPONSIBILITY, ONE DISCRETION, ONE WILL!  True indeed is it, Sir, if these sentiments be maintained,—­true indeed is it that a President of the United States may well repeat from Napoleon what he repeated from Louis the Fourteenth, “I am the state”!

The argument by which the writer of the Protest endeavors to establish the President’s claim to this vast mass of accumulated authority, is founded on the provision of the Constitution that the executive power shall be vested in the President.  No doubt the executive power is vested in the President; but what and how much executive power, and how limited?  To this question I should answer, “Look to the Constitution, and see; examine the particulars of the grant, and learn what that executive power is which is given to the President, either by express words or by necessary implication.”  But so the writer of this Protest does not reason.  He takes these words of the Constitution as being, of themselves, a general original grant of all executive power to the President, subject only to such express limitations as the Constitution prescribes.  This is clearly the writer’s view of the subject, unless, indeed, he goes behind the Constitution altogether, as some expressions would intimate, to search elsewhere for sources of executive power.  Thus, the Protest says that it is not only the right of the President, but that the Constitution makes it his duty, to appoint persons to office; as if the right existed before the Constitution had created the duty.  It speaks, too, of the power of removal, not as a power granted by the Constitution, but expressly as “an original executive power, left unchecked by the Constitution.”  How original?  Coming from what source higher than the Constitution?  I should be glad to know how the President gets possession of any power by a title earlier, or more original, than the grant of the Constitution; or what is meant by an original power, which the President possesses, and which the Constitution has left unchecked in his hands.  The truth is, Sir, most assuredly, that the writer of the Protest, in these passages, was reasoning upon the British constitution, and not upon the Constitution of the United States.  Indeed, he professes to found himself on authority drawn from the constitution of England.  I will read, Sir, the whole passage.  It is this:—­