Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 2.djvu/221

Rh interim of the United States, administers the following polite rebuke to Mr. Murphy:

Entertaining these views, the President is gratified to perceive, in the course you have pursued in your intercourse with the authorities of Texas, the evidences of a cordial coöperation in this cherished object of his policy, but instructs me to say that while approving the general tone and tenor of that intercourse, he regrets to perceive, in the pledges given by you in your communication to Hon. Anson Jones of the 14th of February, that you have suffered your zeal to carry you beyond the line of your instructions, and to commit the President to measures for which he has no Constitutional authority to stipulate.

Does the Senator from Indiana understand that language? The dispatch goes on:

The employment of the Army or Navy against a foreign Power, with which the United States are at peace, is not within the competency of the President.

Does the Senator from Indiana understand that language?

And while he is not indisposed, as a measure of prudent precaution and as preliminary to the proposed negotiation, to concentrate in the Gulf of Mexico and on the southern borders of the United States, a naval and military force to be directed to the defense of the inhabitants and territory of Texas at a proper time, he cannot permit the authorities of that Government or yourself to labor under the misapprehension that he has power to employ them at the period indicated by your stipulations.

I think the Senator from Indiana will no longer question the position of the Government of the United States at that time.