the mixture of selfish and personal motives with the exercise of high political duties.  It will promote true and genuine republicanism, by causing the opinion of the people respecting the measures of government, and the men in government, to be formed and expressed without fear or favor, and with a more entire regard to their true and real merits or demerits.  It will be, so far as its effects reach, an auxiliary to patriotism and public virtue, in their warfare against selfishness and cupidity.

The second check on executive patronage contained in this bill is of still greater importance than the first.  This provision is, that, whenever the President removes any of these officers from office, he shall state to the Senate the reasons for such removal.  This part of the bill has been opposed, both on constitutional grounds and on grounds of expediency.

The bill, it is to be observed, expressly recognizes and admits the actual existence of the power of removal.  I do not mean to deny, and the bill does not deny, that, at the present moment, the President may remove these officers at will, because the early decision adopted that construction, and the laws have since uniformly sanctioned it.  The law of 1820, intended to be repealed by this bill, expressly affirms the power.  I consider it, therefore, a settled point; settled by construction, settled by precedent, settled by the practice of the government, and settled by statute.  At the same time, after considering the question again and again within the last six years, I am very willing to say, that, in my deliberate judgment, the original decision was wrong.  I cannot but think that those who denied the power in 1789 had the best of the argument; and yet I will not say that I know myself so thoroughly as to affirm, that this opinion may not have been produced, in some measure, by that abuse of the power which has been passing before our eyes for several years.  It is possible that this experience of the evil may have affected my view of the constitutional argument.  It appears to me, however, after thorough and repeated and conscientious examination, that an erroneous interpretation was given to the Constitution, in this respect, by the decision of the first Congress; and I will ask leave to state, shortly, the reasons for that opinion, although there is nothing in this bill which proposes to disturb that decision.

The Constitution nowhere says one word of the power of removal from office, except in the case of conviction on impeachment.  Wherever the power exists, therefore, except in cases of impeachment, it must exist as a constructive or incidental power.  If it exists in the President alone, it must exist in him because it is attached to something else, or included in something else, or results from something else, which is granted to the President.  There is certainly no specific grant; it is a power, therefore, the existence of which, if proved at all, is to be proved by inference and argument.  In the only instance in which the Constitution speaks of removal from office, as I have already said, it speaks of it as the exercise of judicial power; that is to say, it speaks of it as one part of the judgment of the Senate, in cases of conviction on impeachment.  No other mention is made, in the whole instrument, of any power of removal.  Whence, then, is the power derived to the President?