ately choose the President. In less than three weeks from the day the seals are broken the Congress ceases to exist. The whole proceeding was intended to be brief, summary, decisive. Read the record from beginning to end, and there will be found no time for a contest, and no authority for one if there were time.

Review the long line of illustrious statesmen, and find, if you can, even one who before the present year ever claimed that Congress had the power to go beyond these five limitations and question the Presidential vote of a State. If we may question the vote in one State, we may question it in all. If we may examine one returning board, we may examine all the officers of elections in all the States. We may open every ballot-box and revise and count the votes of seven million voters. Such a view of the Constitution defeats its own provisions, and renders the election of a President by the States absolutely impossible; because it would always lie in the power of one house or the other, by the brute force of numbers or the power of party spirit, to object, and examine, and inquire, until the arrival of the day when Congress would expire by limitation.

Mr. Speaker, we are dealing with mighty issues. Gentlemen are proposing to have the House seize, and bring to its bar as prisoners, four officers of a State, who are not charged with having violated any clause of our Constitution; who are not charged with having violated any law of the United States; who are not charged with having failed in any point of their duty as defined in our Constitution or laws. The House proposes to go beyond all this, to invade the clear, unquestioned right of a State, to drag its officers fourteen hundred miles away from their capital, and bring with them a portion of the public archives of their State, and surrender them to us. These officers have tendered to our committee the free use of their records to be copied; but they stand on their rights as the lawful custodians of the records of their State, and for that you propose to punish them. If the House can make this demand, we can bring to our bar every officer of every State of the Union; and can make them bring all the archives of all the States. We can thus cause a State to die by inanition, by holding all its officers prisoners at our bar, and turning over all its archives to our committees.

Now, Mr. Speaker, if the defence I am making be the defence

of State rights, then I am for State rights within those limits; I believe I have always been to that extent at least a champion of the rights of the States. How we swing like a pendulum! Sixteen years ago, in the name of State sovereignty, it was proposed by a great party, in this hall, to break the Union in pieces; sixteen years ago, in the name of State sovereignty, it was declared that a certain portion of our people would never submit to an election that declared Abraham Lincoln President; and now, in defiance of all State rights, it is proposed that these great communities these thirty-eight sisters that you call sovereign, though I do not-shall be chained to the wheels of this Congressional chariot, and dragged in fetters to the national Capitol as vassals of the imperial will of— what? — a party in the House of Representatives; not the nation, not the Congress, not the House, but a partisan majority of the House, bent upon the accomplishment of a party purpose. Now, gentlemen, in the name of our country, as you revere the glories of its great past, and would preserve all that is worthiest in the possibilities of its great future, I beg you to pause before you commit this fatal assault upon whatever there may be of sovereignty in the thirty-eight States of the Union.

THE proceedings of the House Committee of Investigation in Louisiana brought into prominence the power of the House over private telegraphic despatches, copies of which were in the custody of the telegraph companies. On the 20th of December, 1876, Mr. Garfield expressed these views touching the general question.

MR. SPEAKER,-If we take the position suggested by the gentleman from Kentucky, that there is no difference between telegraphic communications and oral communications so far as this privilege is concerned, we need take only one other step to destroy the last possible protection that the American people enjoy against the invasion of their privacy by their servants, the House of Representatives. If we now declare that the telegraph is to be put down on the level of mere oral communication, that one of the greatest corporations of the country is to turn common informer against all private citizens, the next

1 Mr. Knott.

and last step will be to declare that the post-office is to be put on the plane of the telegraph. Here is a great institution, unknown to the old law-writers, which has grown up within the last thirty-five years, and which is probably to-day, next to the post-office, the custodian of more secrets in relation to public and private affairs than any other institution on earth. Every day hundreds of thousands of our fellow-citizens intrust their most sacredly private affairs to the telegraph companies, under the seal of their confidence. It is now proposed that all the transactions conducted through this great instrumentality shall be put down to the level of open oral communications. All that public or private malice needs is, by the process of the House, to seize the telegraph operator at any office, require him to bring in his bundle of despatches, and this inquisitorial body can fish out from among them whatever evidence may happen to suit its passion or its caprice. There never was an Anglo-Saxon law, in any country of the Anglo-Saxon world, that would permit so great an invasion of private rights.

Besides destroying the telegraph as a great instrument of commerce and business intercourse, you break down, in the minds of our people, that security under the law which they have enjoyed for so many generations. I say to gentlemen frankly that you and I have never yet seen a Congressional investigation the objects of which were sufficiently important to warrant so great a change in the laws of the country. It were better that every thief should go unwhipped of justice, than that the old guaranties of the law should be destroyed in order to secure his punishment.

In 1870 this question came up in the committee of which I was chairman, the Committee on Banking and Currency, before which a very important investigation was going forward, and there are some gentlemen here who sat with me upon that committee. We were called to investigate the causes which led to the gold panic on what was known as Black Friday. After a large amount of testimony had been taken, it was found that at a given moment the Secretary of the Treasury, under direction of the President, wrote a despatch ordering the sale of gold in New York City; and within a few minutes thereafter the gold market had broken twenty or thirty per cent. But the break came about ten minutes before the official despatch reached New York City; and it was strongly probable that some

trusted officer of the government had been faithless, and had privately informed parties in New York that the order was coming. It was vitally important to the honor and good faith of the nation, that it should be known whether that supposition was true or not. We called the telegraph managers before us to inquire how far they felt at liberty to disclose to us what had passed over their wires, between Washington and New York, within the brief period of half an hour; and by the unanimous agreement of the committee, Democrats and Republicans alike, we narrowed the question down in this way. First, that within a period of twenty minutes of time we would make our inquiry; second, that it should relate only to telegrams bearing upon the government order to sell gold; and, third, that if the telegrams disclosed under these conditions were any of them clearly private, they should be returned to the telegraph company, and not one of them published. That was as far as I thought we could go, and I think it was a wise precedent.

We shall make a most serious mistake if we break over the well-settled rules established for the protection of the business correspondence of citizens. I do not know that the question now proposed will harm any man of either party; but we ought to remember that the safeguards of liberty are only in danger in times of public passion, and in such times it becomes all thoughtful men to take special heed to their steps, and make no precedents which may come back in calmer times to plague the inventors.

COUNTING THE ELECTORAL VOTE.

SPEECH DELIVERED IN THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES, JANUARY 25, 1877.

THE Presidential election of 1876 was strenuously contested by the two great political parties at every point. There were 369 Electors to be chosen. When November 7, the day for appointing Electors in the States, had passed, this was the situation that was presented to the country. Concerning the election of 184 Democratic and 163 Republican Electors there was no question. But the remaining 22 were disputed. The Democrats claimed them, and the Republicans claimed them. If these votes were counted for Mr. Tilden, the Democratic candidate, he would have a majority of 21; if for Mr. Hayes, he would have a majority of one. The Electors whose elections were in doubt were those of Florida, Louisiana, South Carolina, and Oregon. The questions of fact and of law involved in the controversy need not be here stated further than to say that there were charges of intimidation of voters at the polls, of corruption and fraud on the part of State canvassing and returning officers, and of disability, in two or three cases, to exercise the duties of the office on the part of the Electors alleged to be appointed. There were double electoral colleges in the four States, and plural sets of votes for President and Vice-President were transmitted to the seat of government, directed to the President of the Senate. Hence arose the question, Who shall canvass the returns sent to Washington, and decide what votes shall be counted? This question involved this further one, Who shall decide, in the case of the disputed States, which were the legal electoral colleges and the legal electoral votes? Some said the power to decide these questions was lodged in the President of the Senate; others, that it was lodged in the two houses of Congress. The interpretation of the Constitution, and the practice under the Constitution, were thus both involved in heated and passionate contention. In view of this state of affairs, a joint committee of the two houses of Congress was raised "to prepare and report without delay such a measure, either legislative or constitutional, as may,