The superiority of the Legislative branch was thus openly advocated and insisted, and uncontroverted by any Republican supporting the impeachment. Mr. Johnson, according to these oft repeated declarations, was to be tried and convicted, not necessarily for any specific violation of law, or of the Constitution, but by prevailing public opinion--public clamor-in a word, on administrative differences subsisting between the President and the leaders of the dominant party in and out of Congress, and that public opinion, as concurrent developments fully establish, was industriously manufactured throughout the North, on the demand of leaders of the impeachment movement in the House, through the instrumentality of a partisan press and partisan public meetings, and in turn reflected back upon the Senate, in the form of resolutions denunciatory of the President and demanding his impeachment and removal. That was in fact, and in a large sense, the incentive to the impeachment movement, and it was--not confined to a faction, but characterized the dominant portion of the political party then in the ascendancy in and out of Congress. In this state of facts lay largely the vice of the impeachment movement, and it illustrated to a startling degree the danger in the departure from established forms of judicial procedure in such cases. It became apparent, long before the close, that it was but little if anything more than a partisan prosecution--and that fact became more generally and firmly fixed, from day to day, as the trial approached conclusion. In that state of facts, again, and in that sense, the impeachment of the President, was an assault upon the principle of coordination that underlies our political system and thus a menace to our established political forms, as, if successful, it would, logically, have been the practical destruction of the Executive Department--and, in view of previous legislation out of which the impeachment movement had to a degree arisen, and of declarations in the House and Senate quoted in this connection, the final and logical result of conviction would have been the absorption of the Executive functions of the Government by the Legislative Department, and the consequent declension of that Department to a mere bureau for the registration of the decrees of the Legislature. Conscious of the natural tendency to infringement by a given Department of the Government upon the functions of its coordinates, the framers of the Constitution wisely defined the respective spheres of the several departments, and those definitions constitute unmistakable admonition to each as to trespass by either upon the political territory of its coordinates. As John C. Calhoun wrote, in the early days of the Republic: