Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 2.djvu/210

190 States of America, the mistake of acting upon the mighty presumption that he had absorbed in himself all the sovereignty of this great Republic. And this is what I call an indefensible usurpation of those powers which the Constitution withholds from the Presidential office. If the Senator from Wisconsin, or the Senator from Indiana, or the Senator from New Jersey still deny this, I shall look for their arguments with a high degree of curiosity.

I venture to express the hope that this most absurd, most audacious and most un-republican doctrine that the President can, under the Constitution, steal the war-making power from Congress under the shallow pretense of having created by his own arbitrary act an inchoate right of the United States in a foreign country, thus creating for himself the power to use belligerent measures to enforce that inchoate right, will not be heard on the floor of the Senate again. It is indeed time that such a heresy and such practices, so strongly smelling of personal government, should be held up to the contemplation of a republican people, and that a republican Senate, who have sworn to maintain the fundamental laws of this Republic, should openly and emphatically pronounce their disapproval of them.

Senators have been unsparing in their denunciation of the Senator from Massachusetts because he made his speech. I think the Senator from Massachusetts is entitled to the gratitude of every American citizen for having brought this momentous subject to the notice of the country, a subject which has been treated with so much levity, and it is to be hoped that the Senate will not hesitate to do its duty.

Now, sir, I have to follow the Senator from Indiana and the Senator from New Jersey a little further in their discoveries. All Constitutional argument, it seems, having