An example set by so strong a ruler as Jackson, especially in the establishment of a practice so congenial to man's natural love of power, was certain to be followed by other Presidents.

It was followed so vigorously indeed that the forty years succeeding Jackson's advent to power presented a strong contrast with the forty years that preceded it.

The aggregate number of vetoes, therefore, in the forty years that followed General Jackson's first election exceeded fifty, as against six for the forty years preceding it.

It will not escape observation that the most frequent resort to the veto has been by those Presidents who were chosen by the political organization which has always declared its hostility to Executive power.

The Democratic party had its origin and its early growth in the cry against the overshadowing influence of the Presidential office --going so far in their denunciations as to declare that it was aping royalty in its manners and copying…

The men who made this outcry defeated John Quincy Adams who never used the veto, and installed Jackson who resorted to it on all occasions when his judgment differed from the conclusion of a majority of Congress.

Neither Taylor nor Fillmore--both reared in the Whig school --ever attempted to defeat the will of Congress, though each wielded Executive power at a time when questions even more exciting than those of Jackson's era engaged public…

Lincoln presents a strong contrast with his predecessors,--Pierce and Buchanan,--illustrating afresh the contradiction that the party declaiming most loudly against Executive power has constantly abused it.

It is very seldom in the history of political issues, even when partisan feeling is most deeply developed, that so absolute a division is found as was recorded upon the question of adopting the Fourteenth Amendment.

It seems incredible that Democrats can be satisfied with the record made by their party on this most grave and important question.

Every one of the many objects aimed at in the Fourteenth Amendment is founded upon a basis of justice, of liberty, of an enlarged and enlightened nationality.

Even those which may be held as temporary deeply affect more than one generation of American citizens, and are of themselves sufficiently important to justify a great struggle for their adoption.

It was certainly of inestimable concern to the honor of the country that those who had shed their blood and those who had given their treasure for its defense, should have their claims upon the national justice placed beyond the whim, or…

But the leaders who, in official position before the war, had solemnly sworn to support the Constitution, were held to be far more guilty than the multitude who followed them.

They deliberately rebelled against a government to which, on their consciences and on their oaths, they had given their personal pledge of fidelity.

On this point the Republicans held, as has been so often repeated, that the negro should not be included in the basis of representation until he was admitted to suffrage.

There is such absolute justice and fair dealing in this proposition, that no reply which deserves to be called an argument has ever been made to it.

The original provision in the Constitution by which three-fifths of the slaves were enumerated in the basis of representation, agreed to originally as a compromise in connection with the subject of direct taxation, had lost its relevancy…

To concede four and a half millions of negroes to the basis of Southern representation, and at the same time to confine the suffrage to the whites, was not merely a harsh injustice to the colored race, but it was an insulting…

It gave, as was well said at the time, a far greater influence in National affairs to the vote of the Confederate solider in the South than to the vote of the Union soldier in the North.

In the rapid increase of the negro race the offensive discrimination against the North would be continually enlarging in its proportions.

But this rank injustice and this hurtful inequality were removed by the Fourteenth Amendment.

Its opening section settled all conflicts and contradiction on this question by a comprehensive declaration which defined National citizenship and gave to it precedence of the citizenship of a State.

Instead of a man being a citizen of the United States because he was a citizen of one of the States, he was now made a citizen of any State in which he might choose to reside, because he was antecedently a citizen of the United States.

The wonder excited by the raising of the vast army which saved the Union from destruction was even surpassed by the wonder excited by its prompt and peaceful dissolution.