President Polk, in his Annual Message of December, 1846, paid homage to the true principle, when he announced that “the moment the terms of annexation offered by the United States were accepted by Texas, the latter became so far a part of our own country as to make it our duty to afford protection and defence.”[93] And accordingly he directed those military and naval movements which ended in war with Mexico. But it will be observed here that these movements were conditioned on the acceptance by Texas of the terms of annexion definitively proposed by the United States, while our title had been created by Act of Congress, and not by the President alone. Therefore, according to the precedents of our history, reinforced by reason and authority, does the “assumpsit” of the treaty fail. I forbear from characterizing it. My duty is performed, if I exhibit it to the Senate. But this story of a violated Constitution is not yet complete. Even admitting some remote infinitesimal semblance of excuse or apology during the pendency of the treaty, all of which I insist is absurd beyond question, though not entirely impossible in a quarter unused to constitutional questions and heeding them little,--conceding that the “assumpsit” inserted in the treaty by the Secretary of State had deceived the President into the idea that he possessed the kingly prerogative of declaring war at his own mere motion,--and wishing to deal most gently even with an undoubted usurpation of the kingly prerogative, so long as the Secretary of State, sworn counsellor of the President, supplied the formula for the usurpation, (and you will bear witness that I have done nothing but state the case,)--it is hard to hold back, when the same usurpation is openly prolonged after the Senate had rejected the treaty on which the exercise of the kingly prerogative was founded, and when the “assumpsit” devised by the Secretary of State had passed into the limbo of things lost on earth. Here there is no remote infinitesimal semblance of excuse or apology,--nothing,--absolutely nothing. The usurpation pivots on nonentity,--always excepting the kingly will of the President, which constitutionally is a nonentity. The great artist of Bologna, in a much admired statue, sculptured Mercury as standing on a puff of air. The President has not even a puff of air to stand on.