These facts of condition attending and characterizing the trial of President Johnson, pointedly accentuate the danger to our composite form of government which the country then faced. That danger, as it had found frequent illustration in the debates in the House of Representatives on the several propositions for the President's impeachment preceding the bringing of the indictment, lay in the claim of superiority of political function for the Legislative branch over the Executive. The quality of co-ordination of these departments was repeatedly and emphatically denied by conspicuous and influential members of that body during the initial proceedings of the impeachment movement, and even on the floor of the Senate by the managers of the impeachment. To illustrate: Mr. Bingham, in the House, Feb. 22nd, 1868, announced the extraordinary doctrine that "there is no power to review the action of Congress." Again, speaking of the action of the Senate on the 21st of February, on the President's message announcing the removal of Mr. Stanton, he said: "Neither the Supreme Court nor any other Court can question or review this judgment of the Senate." The declaration was made by Messrs. Stevens and Boutwell in the House, that the Senate was its own judge of the validity of its own acts. Mr. Butler, in his opening speech to the Senate, at the beginning of the trial, used this language: A Constitutional tribunal solely, you are bound by no law, either Statute or Common, which may limit your constitutional prerogative. You consult no precedents save those of the law and custom of parliamentary bodies. You are a law unto yourselves, bound only by the natural principles of equity and justice, and salus populi suprema est lex. Feb. 24, 1868, Mr. Stevens said in the House: Neither the Executive nor the Judiciary had any right to interfere with it (Reconstruction) except so far as was necessary to control it by military rule until the sovereign power of the Nation had provided for its civil administration. NO POWER BUT CONGRESS HAD ANY RIGHT TO SAY WHETHER EVER, OR WHEN, they (the rebel States), should be admitted to the Union as States and entitled to the privileges of the Constitution of the United States. * * * I trust that when we come to vote upon this question we shall remember that although it is the duty of the President to see that the laws be executed, THE SOVEREIGN POWER OF THE NATION RESTS IN CONGRESS. Mr. Butler, the leading spirit of the impeachment enterprise, went so far as to make the revolutionary suggestion of the abrogation of the Presidential office in the event of final failure to convict the President--set out in the 8th Chapter. Mr. Sumner insisted that in no judicial sense was the Senate a Court, and therefore not bound by the rules of judicial procedure: