I challenge history for another instance of equal absurdity in legal pretension.

Lord Mansfield did not hesitate to condemn certain objections as “disgraceful subtilties.” What would he have said to the Senator from West Virginia?

If the authority of names could change the unreal into the real, then this pretension might have weight.

It is impossible that anything so essentially frivolous should be recognized in this proceeding.

This learned profession lends to the criminal all the arts in which it excels, giving all to him and forgetting the Republic.

Every doubt, every scruple, every technicality, every subtilty, every quibble, is arrayed on his side, when, by every rule of reason and patriotism, all should be arrayed on the side of our country.

The Public Safety, which is the supreme law, is now imperilled.

The trick of the apologists has been, by stringent application of technical rules, to shut out all except offences charged, and then, when stress was laid upon these offences, to cry out that at most they were only technical, and too…

At last he passed the line, openly, knowingly, defiantly; and now that he is arraigned, we are told that this plain offence is nothing, only a little technicality.

It almost shocks me to think that the President of the United States is to be dragged out of his office on these miserable little questions whether he could make an ad interim appointment for a single day.

Only by excluding the whole context and all its antecedents could the question be reduced to this trivial form; and yet, even thus reduced, it involved nothing less than the supremacy of the laws.

I know not how such a question can be called “trifling.” Often a great cause is presented on a narrow issue: as when English liberty was argued on the claim of ship-money, which was a tax of a few shillings only.

Behind this question, called trifling by the kingly apologists of that day, loftily stood the great cause of the People against Prerogative, being the same now pending before the Senate.

But behind this question, so trifling to the apologists of prerogative, as behind that of ship-money, stood loftily the same great cause.

If such a question can be disparaged as of small moment, then have the martyred dead in all times suffered in vain, then was the costly blood lavished for the suppression of our Rebellion an empty sacrifice.

Of course such a system of exclusion sacrifices justice, belittles this trial, and forgets that essential latitude of inquiry which belongs to a political proceeding, having for its purpose expulsion from office only, and not punishment.

The great offender should be seen in the light of day, precisely as he is, nor more nor less, with nothing dwarfed, with no limits to the vision, and with all the immense background of thronging transgressions filling the horizon as far as…

Anything short of this is the sacrifice of justice.

Events belonging to history, enrolled in the records of the Senate, and familiar to the country, are deliberately shut out from view, while we are treated to legal niceties without end.

Nothing ever occurred so much calculated to bring the profession into disrepute; for never before has been such a theatre where lawyers were actors.

Here was a great question of justice, appealing to the highest sentiments, and involving the best interests of the country; but lawyers, instinctive for the dialectics of the profession, forgot everlasting truth, never to be forgotten with…

When free to choose, and not hired, his argument is the reflection of himself.

Cultured in law, and with aptitude sharpened by its contests, too easily he finds a legal reason for an illegal judgment.

Next to an outright mercenary, give me a lawyer to betray a great cause.

It is impossible to forget that the worst pretensions of prerogative, no matter how colossal, have been shouldered by lawyers.