THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES PROTESTS.

233 up to the last moment of the session, to pass it without that section. "The record of its failure," said General Garfield, "is an emphatic declaration that the House of Representatives have never consented to the establishment of any tribunals, except those authorized by the Constitution of the United States and the laws of Congress." But all the same, the sentences of the Washington Military Commission were carried out on the 7th of July following, while the courts were open, and on the day that a judge had returned to him his writ of habeas corpus with a denial of its effect.

During the second session of the Thirty-eighth Congress, the question of military incarcerations came up in various forms. It began with Mr. Ganson, of New-York. He offers a resolution directing the Committee on Military Affairs to examine into the matter, and make a general jail delivery of the Old Capitol and Carroll prisons. This resolution passes without discussion, on the 18th of January, 1865. Its passage is a surprise. At once, Thaddeus Stevens moves to reconsider. A debate springs up. Mr. Ganson gives the instance which provokes his resolutions. The writer, in a speech, asks why the Trumbull law had not been executed, in the Vallandigham and other cases. There are other cases, as he informs the House, in which the Secretary of the Treasury, under some peculiar "higher law" unknown to our statutes, has, for purposes connected with the revenue, or to protect the issue of greenbacks or shinplasters against counterfeiting, caused persons to be arrested by the military power.

"There are now men in the Capitol Prison," said the author, then a debater, "almost within the sound of the voice of at least some of the members of this House, who are kept there month after month on the mere order of the Solicitor of the Treasury, on the charge of forgery. Applications have been made by their friends again and again to have their persons removed to the proper jurisdictions in the states and districts, where the law is unimpeded by the military authority, and yet no attention has been paid to the request. They still remain there. There is a case from my own district of an old man who has been suspected of counterfeiting. He could be released at any moment by the Solicitor of the Treasury. Is there no relief for these abuses? Shall we not be permitted to inquire about them with a view to future legislation?' Other members instance case after case. Then Henry Winter Davis takes the floor. He places the matter on the highest ground. This is his first but not his last protest. He demands that the committee should examine the facts and spread them before the American people, and then let them say whether there exists any law upon the statute-book of the United States that authorizes the confinement of any American citizen not in the military service, in a loyal state, upon the judgment of a military commission, or, without judicial sanction, at the pleasure of subordinate officers of the government, or even by the order of the President of the United States.

This is bold ground. It is worthy of the parliamentary heroism in the time of the Stuarts and their prerogative. It is audacious, especially for a member of the dominant and arrogant party. General Garfield raises his voice also in indignant remonstrance. He, too, is hailed as the friend of civil liberty. It is vindicated by nearly a unanimous vote - 136 to 5. The debate on this theme took a more significant shape at the ending of the session. Henry Winter Davis rose again to the height of a grand argument in favor of "the right of every citizen to his personal liberty." It was he who offered the section cited by Mr. Garfield in the Milligan case as an amendment declaratory of our Bill of Rights. He held that on it depended the very endurance of republican institutions. When the bill came back from the Senate without that section, he said that no money should be appropriated with his consent, as the expense of so grave a reflection upon the fundamental principles of the government. This was the climax of a long debate. It happened not a half-hour before the death of that Congress. The wildest passions were rife. The bill failed. Henry Winter Davis scorned to yield, even for the passage of some charities in it. "I am determined," said he, "that not one item of this bill shall pass without the whole of it." He reaffirmed the facts herein stated. The bill had been passed, as he showed, to stop these outrageous arrests. To use his own trope,-he would allow the bill to stand in the records like a broken dike, in the midst of the rising flood of lawless power. It would show to future generations how high the flood of lawless power had risen in only three years of civil war. It was an awakening to those who were then with us. Now, exclaimed this gifted Maryland orator,— who reproduced the elegance of Pinckney, with the cogency of Wirt: "The conference committee on the part of the House have come to the determination, so far as the constitutional privileges and prerogatives of this House will enable them to accomplish the result, that this bill shall not become a law if these words do not stand as part of it the affirmation by the representatives of the states and of the people of the inalienable birthright of every American citizen; and on that question they appeal from the judgment of the Senate to the judgment of the American people." Amidst the wildest applause, the three years of arbitrary arrogance and flagrant violation of our Magna Charta was buried beneath the reprobation and scorn of the American House of Representatives! What a triumph an earnest, liberty-loving minority may achieve, if bravely led and inspired with a profound and intelligent love of liberty. A dwarf behind an engine may remove mountains. The closing hours of the last Congress of the war lifted aloft a standard, with a legend worthy of the great liberators of mankind who have contended for human rights established by written codes. Many hundred years ago, the Goths brought their fueros, or bills of right, from the cold forests of the North to the sunny plains and rugged mountains of the old granary of the Roman world, Algiers. The spirit of Tell and

Liberty still remains as a monument through a thousand of years of Swiss republican existence. The Sierras of Spain still echo the words of the patriot Riego. His hymn is the Marseillaise of the Peninsula. After he was hunted, long after he had saved constitutional liberty and favored amnesty for all, he gave to the world the noblest exemplar of patriotism since the days of Brutus.

The traveler sometimes visits an island meadow in the River Thames, near Windsor, now used as a race course. It is known as Runnymede. The traveler does not go there to see the racing, but because that meadow marks an era in the progress of human freedom. There, 666 years ago, on the morning of the 12th of August, the iron-clad barons met King John. They wrested from him the same rights which were violated by the Federal Administration and ostracized by the Indemnity bill of Congress. These rights were written in the Latin of that day, " Nullus liber homo capiatur." Dead language, but vital with liberty-words which Chatham said were worth all the classics: "No free man shall be arrested or imprisoned or deprived of his own free household, or of his liberties, or of his own free customs, or outlawed, or banished, or injured in any manner, nor will we pass sentence upon him, nor send trial upon him, unless by the legal judgment of his peers or by the law of the land." This was the germ of our civil freedom, which men in the passions of war endeavored to uproot after it had grown from the acorn to the oak! Judge Thomas, of Massachusetts, who was a member of the preceding Congress, finely expressed it by another trope: "From the gray of that morning streamed the rays, which, uplifting with the hours, coursing with the years, and keeping pace with the centuries, have encircled the whole earth with the glorious light of English libertythe liberty for which our fathers planted these commonwealths in the wilderness; for which they went through the baptism of blood and fire in the Revolution; which they imbedded and hoped to make immortal in the Constitution; without which the Constitution would not be worth the parchment upon which it was written." As if to make the Great Charter sacred forever in the Anglo-Saxon memory, to connect it with the holiest emotions of religion, and to sanction it by the hopes and the terrors of the unseen world, the Catholic hierarchy of that day-long before Protestantism arose, before the Reformation, before we had the transcendental light of our Puritan preachers

the English Catholic hierarchy, then the champions of the oppressed and the people, were convoked a few days after the unwilling king signed the charter. Picture that great convocation! It meets in Westminster Abbey, the mausoleum of the dead royalty and genius of Britain. Here is the king upon his throne, sceptred and crowned, impurpled in his robes of office; near him are the lords temporal in their scarlet gowns; on his right are the gentlemen of England representing the Commons, the people of the realm; and within the altar are the lords spiritual, clad in all the pomp of their pon