will offer them in the ordinary way, by the methods prescribed in the Constitution. If you offer those propositions of legislation as separate measures we will meet you in the fraternal spirit of fair debate and will discuss their merits. Some of your measures many of us will vote for in separate bills. But you shall not coerce any independent branch of this government, even by the threat of starvation, to consent to surrender its voluntary powers until the question has been appealed to the sovereign and decided in your favor. On this ground we plant ourselves, and here will stand to the end.

* * *

JOSEPH C. S. BLACKBURN,

OF KENTUCKY.

(BORN 1838.)

REPLY TO MR. GARFIELD; HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES, APRIL 3, 1879.

MR. CHAIRMAN:

I do not intend, sir, to be personal in any thing that I may say. There has come from different members of the other side of the House during this debate that which, in my judgment, requires and merits notice, and I shall go back, before I shall have finished, several days to reply as best I may to the points that have been made by the distinguished gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Garfield).

*

*

*

It is charged, sir, not that the amendment under consideration involves of itself an unconstitutional piece of legislation, but it is urged by various distinguished members on this floor that it is revolutionary in its character; that it has no proper place on an appropriation bill;

that it is out of line, and deserves the condemnation of the House because it is an exotic in this connection and should have been consid

ered as an independent bill. It is charged, further, that the tendency and operation of it will be to restrict the power of the Presidency as Comander-in-Chief of the Army of the United States.

Now, Mr. Chairman, he is but a poor student of this country's history who is not able to satisfy himself that from the very formation of the Federal Constitution down to the present time it has ever been held, and that by the highest authorities of the land, and never successfully denied, that it was a power not only of the American Congress, but a power of this House, to control the employment of the army by a withholding of supplies.

The debates upon the formation of the Federal Constitution which lie before me show that the brightest intellects assembled in that convention asserted this doctrine in its broadest term, and no man dared gainsay it. It is one of those features of English liberty that have come down to us by adoption.

It was so stated in the debates upon the formation of this instrument, as given to us, that

it is ever and always in the power of the House of Representatives, by copying the example of the House of Commons of England in withholding supplies, to control absolutely the employment and conduct of the army. You may follow that theory down at short intervals, and in 1819, when an army appropriation bill was considered and passed in this Chamber, and it was proposed to restrict the power of the President by specifying the purpose to which the appropriations should be applied, the very same argument was made against it then that our friends on the other side hurl against us now.

It was upon that occasion that Mr. Mercer, one of the brightest among the law-makers of the government of his day, asserted upon this floor, without encountering contradiction, that it was in the power of the House of Representatives to withhold supplies altogether for the maintenance of the army, if, indeed, that should become necessary to control its operation. It was then that one whose patriotism has never been questioned, though it has survived through the greater portion of a fading century only to grow brighter as the ages go by,-it was then that not only Kentucky's but America's great commoner, Mr. Clay, declared in his burning

words of eloquence, uttered where we now sit, that he was ready to make the issue with the Executive and offer him a bill with the objectionable features incorporated in it, and to say to the Executive : "Sign or refuse to sign it; but if you do refuse to sign it, declaring that we have not the power to pass it, then my answer to you shall be, neither has the Execu-. tive the power that you arrogate to yourself." And you may come down from then till now, and never in the history of this government has it been denied that the Constitution itself, which gives to Congress the right to pass these money bills to provide means for the support and maintenance of a military establishment, carries with it the resultant right on the part of Congress to withhold these appropriations when, in its judgment, it is necessary to prevent abuses in the employment of the military.

In the very nature of things this proposed amendment of the law cannot be revolutionary. It is a repealing statute; its only purpose and object is to repeal an existing law. I will not pause now to tell how or under what circumstances it was passed; I will not now pause to delineate the motives which, in a great measure, because of the prevalence of natural pas