Of course, Sir, I cannot share the doubts attributed to the President. To me they seem groundless and fallacious. Waiving all question of their accuracy as an interpretation of the Constitution, even in criminal proceedings, I cannot forbear saying that they proceed on the mistaken idea of a procedure by _indictment_ and not by _war_, subjecting the country to all the constraint of a criminal trial when the exigency requires the ample latitude of war. If soldiers are sent forth to battle, if fields are occupied as camps, and houses are occupied as hospitals, without permission of the owners, it is under the War Powers of Congress, or, in other words, the belligerent rights of this Government. And it is by virtue of these same belligerent rights that the property of an enemy is taken. Now, if he be an enemy, is there in the Constitution any check upon these rights? Whether you choose to take property for life or beyond life, the Constitution is indifferent; for all constitutional limitations are entirely inapplicable to belligerent rights. There are express words ordaining that you must not “abridge the freedom of speech or of the press,” or “infringe the right of the people to keep and bear arms”; nor can you take “life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.” And yet, wherever your armies move, and elsewhere too, you do all these very things in the exercise of acknowledged belligerent rights. As plainly, the right of confiscation, whether for life or beyond life, is also yours. Unhappily, Sir, our country is engaged in war,--terrible, relentless, unquestionable war,--and if we would not discard success, it must be prosecuted as war, in the full exercise of belligerent rights. If we were dealing with sporadic cases of treason, with simple sedition, or with a mere outbreak, our process would be limited by the Constitution; but with an enemy before us, lashed into fury and led on by “Até hot from Hell,” where is the limit to the powers to be employed? I remember that Burke, in his great effort on Conciliation with America, says: “It looks to me to be narrow and pedantic to apply the ordinary ideas of criminal justice to this great public contest; I do not know the method of drawing up an indictment against an whole people.”[106] But when, on account of a provision in the Constitution obviously intended only for the protection of _the citizen_, you refuse to take the property of _an enemy in open war_, then do you substitute the safeguards of criminal justice for war, thus voluntarily weakening your armies and diminishing your power. I am tempted to say, that, in devotion to the form of the Constitution, you sacrifice its substance. I might say, that, in misapplying the text of the Constitution, you sacrifice the Constitution itself.