adopted into our Constitution at the close of the Revolution.”  Would not the demonstration have been better if it could have been truly said that these safeguards had been adopted and applied during the civil wars and during our Revolution, instead of after the one and at the close of the other?  I too am devotedly for them after civil war, and before Civil war, and at all times, “except when, in cases of rebellion or invasion, the public safety may require” their suspension.  The resolutions proceed to tell us that these safeguards “have stood the test of seventy-six years of trial under our republican system, under circumstances which show that, while they constitute the foundation of all free government, they are the elements of the enduring stability of the republic.”  No one denies that they have so stood the test up to the beginning of the present rebellion, if we except a certain occurrence at New Orleans hereafter to be mentioned; nor does any one question that they will stand the same test much longer after the rebellion closes.  But these provisions of the Constitution have no application to the case we have in hand, because the arrests complained of were not made for treason—­that is, not for the treason defined in the Constitution, and upon the conviction of which the punishment is death—­nor yet were they made to hold persons to answer for any capital or otherwise infamous crimes; nor were the proceedings following, in any constitutional or legal sense, “criminal prosecutions.”  The arrests were made on totally different grounds, and the proceedings following accorded with the grounds of the arrests.  Let us consider the real case with which we are dealing, and apply to it the parts of the Constitution plainly made for such cases.

Prior to my installation here it had been inculcated that any State had a lawful right to secede from the national Union, and that it would be expedient to exercise the right whenever the devotees of the doctrine should fail to elect a president to their own liking.  I was elected contrary to their liking; and accordingly, so far as it was legally possible, they had taken seven States out of the Union, had seized many of the United States forts, and had fired upon the United States flag, all before I was inaugurated, and, of course, before I had done any official act whatever.  The rebellion thus begun soon ran into the present civil war; and, in certain respects, it began on very unequal terms between the parties.  The insurgents had been preparing for it more than thirty years, while the government had taken no steps to resist them.  The former had carefully considered all the means which could be turned to their account.  It undoubtedly was a well-pondered reliance with them that in their own unrestricted effort to destroy Union, Constitution and law, all together, the government would, in great degree, be restrained by the same Constitution and law from arresting their progress.  Their sympathizers invaded all departments of the