“I pray to God I may be mistaken in the opinions I entertain as to the designs of gentlemen to whom I am opposed. Those designs I believe hostile to the powers of this government. State pride extinguishes a national sentiment. Whatever power is taken from this government is given to the States. The ruins of this government aggrandize the States. There are States which are too proud to be controlled, whose sense of greatness and resource renders them indifferent to our protection, and induces a belief that if no general government existed, their influence would be more extensive and their importance more conspicuous. There are gentlemen who make no secret of an extreme point of depression to which the government is to be sunk. To that point we are rapidly progressing.” The charge was certainly emphatic, and deserved as clear an answer from Giles as Bayard gave to the charge of monarchical tendencies. On the constitutional point involved in the Bill before the House, Bayard was equally distinct:-- “The point on which I rely is that you can do no act which impairs the independence of a judge. When gentlemen assert that the office may be vacated notwithstanding the incumbency of a judge, do they consider that they beg the very point which is in controversy? The office cannot be vacated without violating the express provision of the Constitution in relation to the tenure.... The second plain, unequivocal provision on this subject is that the compensation of the judge shall not be diminished during the term he continues in office. This provision is directly levelled at the power of the legislature: they alone could reduce the salary. Could this provision have any other design than to place the judge out of the power of Congress? You cannot reduce a part of the compensation, but you may extinguish the whole. What is the sum of this notable reasoning? You cannot remove the judge from the office, but you may take the office from the judge; you cannot take the compensation from the judge, but you may separate the judge from the compensation. If your Constitution cannot resist reasoning like this, then indeed is it waste paper.” When Bayard reached Giles’s favorite doctrine that patronage was a Federalist system, and the charge that two senators who voted for the Judiciary Act of 1801 were rewarded by the offices vacated in consequence of promotions to circuit judgeships, he produced a true oratorical sensation by a retort that sank deep into the public memory:--