Sir, we must be guided by some rule in this grave proceeding--something more certain than an impossibility to arraign the President for a specific crime--and when the gentleman from Massachusetts, in commenting on one of the alleged offenses of the President, that we could not arraign him for the specific crime, he disclosed the weakness of the case we are now considering. If we cannot arraign the President for a specific crime, for what are we to proceed against him? For a bundle of generalities such as we have in the volume of testimony reported by the committee to the House in this case? If we cannot state upon paper a specific crime, how are we to carry this case to the Senate for trial? At the close of his speech, Mr. Wilson moved to lay the subject of impeachment on the table, and the yeas and nays were ordered. Several motions were then made--to adjourn, to adjourn to a day certain, etc.--which with roll calls practically consumed the day, and the motion of Mr. Wilson went over. The next day, Dec. 7th, the question again came up in its order, and after several unsuccessful attempts to procure a vote on Mr. Wilson's motion to lay the Impeachment Resolution on the table, Mr. Wilson, by agreement, withdrew his motion, and called for the yeas and nays on the adoption of the resolution: That Andrew Johnson, President of the United States, be impeached for high crimes and misdemeanors. The yeas and nays were ordered, and the vote was yeas 57, nays 108. So the resolution to impeach the President was rejected by the very emphatic vote of 67 to 108--nearly two to one--and by a House two-thirds Republican. So ended the first effort to impeach the President--the first formal action to that end having been taken on January 7, 1867, and the final vote at the close, and its abandonment, December 7, 1867. For eleven months the overwhelming Republican majority of the House had been vigorously active in its search for evidence of criminality on the part of the President that would warrant the basing of an impeachment. No effort was left untried--no resource that promised a possible hope of successful exploitation was neglected. Republican partisans were set to the work of sleuth-hounds in the search for testimony in maintenance of the charges preferred, and an ever ready partisan press teemed from the beginning to the end of that time with animadversions upon Mr. Johnson's administration and denunciation of his alleged desertion of Mr. Lincoln's plan of restoration, of treachery to the party that had elected him, and a demand for his impeachment. To be lukewarm in that controversy, or even to fail to join in the popular denunciation of Mr. Johnson was to put one's self at once under suspicion with the great mass of the dominant party, and without the pale of its consideration.