The person who presides is simply, according to the language of our Rules, “presiding officer,” and this designation is the equivalent or synonym of speaker, and also of prolocutor, each of which signifies somebody who speaks for the house. It is not implied that he votes with the house, much less that he decides for the house, but only that he is the voice of the house,--its speaker. What the house has to say it says through him; but, except as organ of the house, he is silent, unless also a member, when to his powers as presiding officer he superadds the powers of a member also. From this brief statement it appears at once how limited his functions must be. Here I might stop; but, since this question has assumed unexpected importance, I am induced to go further. It is easy to show that the language of the National Constitution, if seen in the light of English parliamentary history, must have an interpretation identical with its natural import. Nothing is clearer than this. If language employed in the National Constitution had already, at the time of its formation, received a definite meaning, it must be interpreted accordingly. Thus, when the Constitution secures “trial by jury,” it secures that institution as defined by antecedent English law. So, also, when it declares that the judicial power shall extend to “all cases in law and equity” arising under the National Constitution, it recognizes the distinction between law and equity peculiar to English law. Courts of Common Law and Courts of Equity are all implied in this language; and since there is no further definition of their powers, we must ascertain them in England. Cushing, in determining the rules of proceeding in our American Legislatures, says:-- “Such was the practice of the two Houses of the British Parliament when our ancestors emigrated; … and such has continued to be, and now is, the practice in that body.”[97] This resource has been most persuasively presented by Mr. Wirt, in his remarkable argument on the impeachment of Judge Peck, where he vindicates and expounds the true rule of interpretation. According to this eminent authority, what he calls “the English archetypes” were the models for the framers of the National Constitution. The courts were fashioned after these “archetypes.” They were instituted according to “the English _originals_, to which they were manifestly referred by the Constitution itself.”[98] Here again I quote the words of Mr. Wirt. All this is precisely applicable to that part of the National Constitution under consideration. In essential features it was borrowed from England. There is its original, its model, its archetype. Therefore to England we go.