The President, as the chief executive power, must have a free and entirely unfettered communication with the coordinate powers of Government. As the organ of intercourse with other nations, he is the only source from which a knowledge of our relations with them can be conveyed to the legislative branches. It results from this that the utmost freedom from all restraint in the details into which he is obliged to enter of international concerns and of the measures in relation to them is essential to the proper performance of this important part of his functions. He must exercise them without having continually before him the fear of offending the susceptibility of the powers whose conduct he is obliged to notice. In the performance of this duty he is subject to public opinion and his own sense of propriety for an indiscreet, to his constituents for a dangerous, and to his constitutional judges for an illegal, exercise of the power, but to no other censure, foreign or domestic. Were any foreign powers permitted to scan the communications of the Executive, their complaints, whether real or affected, would involve the country in continual controversies; for the right being acknowledged, it would be a duty to exercise it by demanding a disavowal of every phrase they might deem offensive and an explanation of every word to which an improper interpretation could be given. The principle, therefore, has been adopted that no foreign power has a right to ask for explanations of anything that the President, in the exercise of his functions, thinks proper to communicate to Congress, or of any course he may advise them to pursue. This rule is not applicable to the Government of the United States alone, but, in common with it, to all those in which the constitutional powers are distributed into different branches. No such nation desirous of avoiding foreign influence or foreign interference in its councils; no such nation possessing a due sense of its dignity and independence, can long submit to the consequences of this interference. When these are felt, as they soon will be, all must unite in repelling it, and acknowledge that the United States are contending in a cause common to them all, and more important to the liberal Governments of Europe than even to themselves; for it is too obvious to escape the slightest attention that the Monarchies of Europe by which they are surrounded will have all the advantage of this supervision of the domestic councils of their neighbors without being subject to it themselves. It is true that in the representative Governments of Europe executive communications to legislative bodies have not the extension that is given to them in the United States, and that they are therefore less liable to attack on that quarter; but they must not imagine themselves safe. In the opening address, guarded as it commonly is, every proposition made by the ministry, every resolution of either chamber, will offer occasions for