Forsey wanted to know if perjury in taking the official oath were not a crime committed in office. Another member asked whether it was the commission of the crime itself which disqualified, or the conviction of the crime. The gavel sounded, and the member who had the floor persisted. “I take it that the House cannot prefer articles of impeachment against a private citizen who has unlawfully usurped an office. If he is removed at all, it should be by proceedings in the chancery court in the nature of a _quo warranto_.” Mr. Kinsard rose, half leaning against his desk with a swaying negligence of posture, to call attention to the fact that anything in the nature of _quo warranto_ wouldn’t begin to do. To have a little one-horse chancellor way up yonder in the seclusion of the mountains dump Judge Gwinnan out of his office would not serve the purpose. Could any man imagine that that proceeding, known merely to the members of the bar and the few intelligent citizens of that benighted district who took note of such matters, would satisfy such an animosity as the member from the floaterial district of Cherokee and Kildeer had avowed, with a cheek which might be contemplated only in astounded admiration? Would the infliction of that limited degradation glut the member’s ravening greed for revenge for his personal grudges? No! the member wished to disgrace Judge Gwinnan with all the publicity that even the attempt to impeach would entail—he designed that it should be canvassed throughout the length and breadth of the State. It should resound through the clarion columns of every newspaper. Every State in the Union should know that the Senate of Tennessee had organized as a court of impeachment, and the name of Gwinnan should be the synonym of contumely. Upon his word, he could hardly take in the vastness of the effrontery that emboldened the member to acknowledge, to proclaim to this House, his gross, his sordid personal motives, in attacking one of the most able, most respected, most diligent, most upright, of the State judiciary. He appealed to the higher feeling of the House. He begged that they would not be driven like so many sheep into an investigation which was in its very inception an insult, an outrage, and a scandal. A member demanded from his seat if it were not an obligation imperatively imposed upon the House to inquire into such a rumor, for the purpose of ascertaining and eliciting the truth or falsehood it promulgated. Since such a rumor was abroad, it behooved Judge Gwinnan’s friends to advocate an investigation, for it was his only hope of vindication if he were maligned.