it your own; but you have put the measures in their most offensive form by tacking them all to the two great appropriation bills.

Another equally groundless charge against me and my associates is that we have threatened your bills with an Executive veto. I repel the charge as wholly untrue in fact. I said nothing that can be tortured into such a threat. It would be indecent on my part; it would be indecent for any of us even to speak of what the Executive intends to do; for none of us have the right to know. But you, in advance, proclaimed to the country and to him, that, if he dares to exercise his constitutional right of refusing his consent, you will refuse to vote the supplies for the government; in other words, you will starve it to death. That is the proposition we have debated.

My distinguished friend from Virginia,1 who has come nearer meeting this case with argument than any other man on that side, has made a point which I respect as an evidence of the gallantry of his intellect. He says that under our Constitution we can vote supplies to the army for but two years; that we may impose conditions upon our supplies, and if these be refused the army ceases to exist after the 30th of June following. In short, that the annual Army Bill is the act of reconstituting the army. He is mistaken in one vital point. The army is an organization created by general laws; and so far as the creation of officers and grades is concerned, it is independent of the appropriation bills. The supplies, of course, come through appropriations. I grant that, if supplies are refused to the army, it must perish of inanition; it becomes a skeleton; but its anatomy was created by general law, and it would remain a skeleton, your monument of starvation.

The gentleman from Virginia says, "Unless you let us append a condition which we regard a redress of grievances, we will let the army be annihilated on the 30th of next June, by withholding supplies." That is legitimate argument; that is a frank declaration of your policy. Let us examine the proposition. What is the "grievance" of which the gentleman complains? He uses the word "grievance" in the old English sense, as though the king were thrusting himself in the way of the nation by making a war contrary to the nation's wish. But his "grievance" is a law of the land, a law made by the representatives

1 Mr. Tucker.

of the people, by all the forms of consent known to the Constitution. It is his "grievance" that he cannot get rid of this law by the ordinary and constitutional method of repeal. When he can get rid of any law by the union of all consents required to make or unmake a law, he gets rid of it lawfully, whether it be a grievance or a blessing; but his method is first to call a law a "grievance," and then try to get rid of it in defiance of the processes which the Constitution prescribes for the law-making power of the nation. I denounce his method as unconstitutional and revolutionary, and one that will result in far greater evil than that of which he complains. If he goes to the American people with the proposition to annihilate our army on the 30th of June next, unless the President, contrary to his conscience, contrary to his sense of duty, shall sign whatever Congress may send him,-I say if the gentleman from Virginia puts that proposition before the American people, we will debate it in the forum of every patriotic heart, and will abide the result. If the party which, after eighteen years' banishment from power, has come back, as the gentleman from Kentucky1 said yesterday, to its "birthright of power," or "heritage," as it is recorded in the Record of this morning, — is to signalize its return by striking down the gallant and faithful army of the United States, the people of this country will not be slow to understand that there are reminiscences of that army which these gentlemen would willingly forget, by burying both the army and the memories of its great service to the Union in one grave. We do not seek to revive the unhappy memories of the war; but we are unwilling to see the army perish at the hands of Congress, even if its continued existence should occasionally awaken the memory of its former glories.

Now, let it be understood once for all that we do not deny — we have never denied - your right to make such rules for this House as you please. Under those rules, as you make or construe them, you may put all your legislation upon these bills as riders. But we say that, whatever your rules may be, you must make or repeal a law in accordance with the Constitution, by the triple consent to which I referred the other day, or you must do it by violence. As my friend from Connecticut 2 well said, if you can elect a President and a Congress in 1880, you have to wait only two years, and you have the three consents. 1 Mr. Blackburn. 2 Mr. Hawley.

You can then, without revolution, tear out this statute and all the rest. You can follow out the programme which some of your members have suggested, and tear out one by one the records of the last eighteen years. Some of them are glorious with the unquenchable light of liberty; some of them stand as the noblest trophies of freedom; but with full power in your hands, you can destroy them. But we ask you to restrain your rage against them until you have the lawful power to smite them down.

My friend from Virginia, whom I know to be a master and lover of mathematics, has formulated his argument in an equation: "Right equals duty plus power." Now, I say to the gentleman that his sense of duty resides in his own breast; but power, the other part of the second member of his equation, must be found, not in his consciousness, but in the Constitution of the United States. His notions of duty lead him to tear down the laws which the republic enacted to protect the purity of national elections, and to use such force as may be necessary to keep the peace while the national voice is finding expression at the polls. That, I say, is his notion of duty, of which he is sole arbiter; but when he comes to superadd power, in order to complete his "right" as a legislator, I hope he will not evoke that power out of his consciousness, but will seek for it in the great charter, the Constitution of the United States. According to his own algebra, he must have both these elements before he can claim the "right" to overturn these laws which he denounces as grievances.

Now, Mr. Chairman, let me add a word in conclusion, lest I may be misunderstood. I said last session, and I have said since, that if you want this whole statute concerning the use of the army at the polls torn from your books, I will help you to do it. If you will offer a naked proposition to repeal those two sections of the Revised Statutes named in the sixth section of this bill, I will vote with you. But you do not ask a repeal of those sections. Why? They impose restrictions upon the use of the army, limiting its functions and punishing its officers for any infraction of these limitations; but you seek to strike out a negative clause, thereby making new and affirmative legislation of the most sweeping and dangerous character. Your proposed modification of the law affects not the army alone, but the whole civil power of the United States. Civil officers are

included in these sections; and if the proposed amendment be adopted, you deny to every civil officer of the United States any power whatever to summon the armed posse to help him enforce the processes of the law. If you pass the section in that form, you impose restrictions upon the civil authorities of the United States never before proposed in any Congress by any legislator since this government began. I say, therefore, in the shape you propose it, this is much the worst of all your riders. In the beginning of this contest we understood that you desired only to get the army away from the polls. As that would still leave the civil officers full power to keep the peace at the polls, I thought it was the least important and the least dangerous of your demands; but as you have put it here, it is the most dangerous. If you re-enact it in the shape presented, it becomes a later law than the supervisors' and marshals' law, and pro tanto repeals the latter. As it stands now in the statutebook, it is the earlier statute, and is pro tanto itself repealed by the marshals' law of 1871, and is therefore harmless so far as it relates to civil officers; but if you put it in here, you deny the power of the marshals of the United States to perform their duties whenever a riot may require the use of an armed posse.

The gentleman from Maryland1 said, the other day, there was nothing in the Constitution which empowered any officer of the United States to keep the peace in the States. I ask that gentleman to tell us whether the United States has no power to keep the peace in the great post-office in Baltimore, so that the postmaster may attend to his duties; whether it has not the power to keep the peace along the line of every railroad that carries our mails, or where any post-rider of the Star Service carries the mail on his saddle; whether it has not the right, if need be, to line the post-road with troops, and to bring the guns of the navy to bear to protect any customhouse or lighthouse of the United States. And yet, if the gentleman's theory be correct, we cannot enforce a single civil process of this government by the aid of an armed posse, without making it a penitentiary offence on the part of the officer who does it.

1 Mr. McLane.

THE NATIONAL ELECTIONS PROTECTED

BY NATIONAL AUTHORITY.

REMARKS MADE IN THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES,
APRIL 26, 1879.

THE Legislative, Executive, and Judicial Appropriation Bill of the Extra Session of the Forty-sixth Congress contained "political" provisions touching jurors in the United States courts, supervisors of elections, and deputy marshals; the great point being so to change the laws as almost wholly to withdraw the national power and authority from the elections of the members of the House of Representatives in the States.1 Pending this bill Mr. Garfield made the following remarks. The bill passed the two houses, but was vetoed by President Hayes, May 29.

MR.

R. CHAIRMAN-I had intended to speak somewhat elaborately upon this bill, but I have preferred to give way for the sake of allowing those who had not spoken an opportunity to be heard. I would not rise now to ask the attention of the House at all, but for the sake of correcting a few plain misapprehensions and evasions in this debate. The gentleman who has just taken his seat 2 has said that I have led in an attempt to raise sectional feeling in the North against the patriotic people of the South. It is the old and absurd cry of a sectional North and a national South; that is, the thirty million people of the North, and their representatives, of whom he is one, are sectional, passionate, unkind, and the fifteen millions of national-minded and patriotic people of the South are suffering from this narrow and unjust sectionalism. The gentleman reminds me of what he was pleased to call a patriotic 1 See McPherson's Handbook of Politics for 1880, p. 117, for these provisions. 2 Mr. Ewing.