Mr. President, in one of the French comedies, as you know, in which the dulness and prolixity of legal argument is intended to be severely satirized, while the advocate is tediously groping among ancient lore having nothing to do with his case, the judge grows impatient, and at last cries out to him to come down to the flood!  I really wish, Sir, that the writer of this Protest, since he was discussing matters of the highest importance to us as Americans, and which arise out of our own peculiar Constitution, had kept himself, not only on this side the general deluge, but also on this side the Atlantic.  I desire that the broad waves of that wide sea should continue to roll between us and the influence of those foreign principles and foreign precedents which he so eagerly adopts.

In asserting power for an American President, I prefer that he should attempt to maintain his assertions on American reasons.  I know not, Sir, who the writer was (I wish I did); but whoever he was, it is manifest that he argues this part of his case, throughout, on the principles of the constitution of England.  It is true, that, in England, the king is regarded as the original fountain of all honor and all office; and that anciently, indeed, he possessed all political power of every kind.  It is true that this mass of authority, in the progress of that government, has been diminished, restrained, and controlled, by charters, by immunities, by grants, and by various modifications, which the friends of liberty have, at different periods, been able to obtain or to impose.  All liberty, as we know, all popular privileges, as indeed the word itself imports, were formerly considered as favors and concessions from the monarch.  But whenever and wherever civil freedom could get a foothold, and could maintain itself, these favors were turned into rights.  Before and during the reigns of the princes of the Stuart family, they were acknowledged only as favors or privileges graciously allowed, although, even then, whenever opportunity offered, as in the instance to which I alluded just now, they were contended for as rights; and by the Revolution of 1688 they were acknowledged as the rights of Englishmen, by the prince who then ascended the throne, and as the condition on which he was allowed to sit upon it.  But with us there never was a time when we acknowledged original, unrestrained, sovereign power over us.  Our constitutions are not made to limit and restrain pre-existing authority.  They are the instruments by which the people confer power on their own servants.  If I may use a legal phrase, the people are grantors, not grantees.  They give to the government, and to each branch of it, all the power it possesses, or can possess; and what is not given they retain.  In England, before her revolution, and in the rest of Europe since, if we would know the extent of liberty or popular right, we must go to grants, to charters, to allowances and indulgences.  But with us, we go to grants and to constitutions to learn the extent of the powers of government.  No political power is more original than the Constitution; none is possessed which is not there granted; and the grant, and the limitations in the grant, are in the same instrument.