This Prohibition Is Therefore Expressly Placed Upon Congress, And This Prohibition Contains The Only Authority Under Which The Privilege Can Be Constitutionally Suspended.

Then comes the article on the executive, which defines the powers that the President shall exercise.

In that article there is no word referring to the suspension of the privilege of the writ. He that runs may read.

I say, therefore, that Mr. Lincoln's government has committed a breach of the Constitution in taking upon itself to suspend the privilege; a breach against the letter of the Constitution. It has assumed a power which the Constitution has not given it - which, indeed, the Constitution, by placing it in the hands of another body, has manifestly declined to put into the hands of the Executive; and it has also committed a breach against the spirit of the Constitution. The chief purport of the Constitution is to guard the liberties of the people, and to confide to a deliberative body the consideration of all circumstances by which those liberties may be affected. The President shall command the army; but Congress shall raise and support the army. Congress shall declare war. Congress shall coin money. Congress, by one of its bodies, shall sanction treaties. Congress shall establish such law courts as are not established by the Constitution. Under no circumstances is the President to decree what shall be done. But he is to do those things which the Constitution has decreed or which Congress shall decree. It is monstrous to suppose that power over the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus would, among such a people, and under such a Constitution, be given without limit to the chief officer, the only condition being that there should be some rebellion. Such rebellion might be in Utah Territory; or some trouble in the uttermost bounds of Texas would suffice. Any invasion, such as an inroad by the savages of Old Mexico upon New Mexico, would justify an arbitrary President in robbing all the people of all the States of their liberties! A squabble on the borders of Canada would put such a power into the hands of the President for four years; or the presence of an English frigate in the St. Juan channel might be held to do so. I say that such a theory is monstrous.

And the effect of this breach of the Constitution at the present day has been very disastrous. It has taught those who have not been close observers of the American struggle to believe that, after all, the Americans are indifferent as to their liberties. Such pranks have been played before high heaven by men utterly unfitted for the use of great power, as have scared all the nations. Mr. Lincoln, the President by whom this unconstitutional act has been done, apparently delegated his assumed authority to his minister, Mr. Seward. Mr. Seward has reveled in the privilege of unrestrained arrests, and has locked men up with reason and without. He has instituted passports and surveillance; and placed himself at the head of an omnipresent police system with all the gusto of a Fouche, though luckily without a Fouche's craft or cunning.

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