James Blaine: “Should there be any grounds of suspicion of a fraudulent count on either side it should be reported and denounced at…”

All these provisions are made to protect the States, not to authorize an attack by one part of the country upon another; to preserve the peace, and not to plunge them into civil war.

Under such circumstances, to send a military force into any State, with orders to act against the people, would be simply making war upon them.

Without the exercise of those functions which belong exclusively to the civil service, the laws cannot be executed in any event, no matter what may be the physical strength which the Government has at its command.

And if Congress shall break up the present Union by unconstitutionally putting strife and enmity and armed hostility between different sections of the country, instead of the domestic tranquility which the Constitution was meant to insure…