The legal relation is analogous to that of principal and agent.  It is the President upon whom the Constitution devolves, as head of the executive department, the duty to see that the laws are faithfully executed; but as he can not execute them in person, he is allowed to select his agents, and is made responsible for their acts within just limits.  So complete is this presumed delegation of authority in the relation of a head of Department to the President that the Supreme Court of the United States have decided that an order made by a head of Department is presumed to be made by the President himself.

The principal, upon whom such responsibility is placed for the acts of a subordinate, ought to be left as free as possible in the matter of selection and of dismissal.  To hold him to responsibility for an officer beyond his control; to leave the question of the fitness of such an agent to be decided for him and not by him; to allow such a subordinate, when the President, moved by “public considerations of a high character,” requests his resignation, to assume for himself an equal right to act upon his own views of “public considerations” and to make his own conclusions paramount to those of the President—­to allow all this is to reverse the just order of administration and to place the subordinate above the superior.

There are, however, other relations between the President and a head of Department beyond these defined legal relations, which necessarily attend them, though not expressed.  Chief among these is mutual confidence.  This relation is so delicate that it is sometimes hard to say when or how it ceases.  A single flagrant act may end it at once, and then there is no difficulty.  But confidence may be just as effectually destroyed by a series of causes too subtle for demonstration.  As it is a plant of slow growth, so, too, it may be slow in decay.  Such has been the process here.  I will not pretend to say what acts or omissions have broken up this relation.  They are hardly susceptible of statement, and still less of formal proof.  Nevertheless, no one can read the correspondence of the 5th of August without being convinced that this relation was effectually gone on both sides, and that while the President was unwilling to allow Mr. Stanton to remain in his Administration, Mr. Stanton was equally unwilling to allow the President to carry on his Administration without his presence.

In the great debate which took place in the House of Representatives in 1789, in the first organization of the principal Departments, Mr. Madison spoke as follows: