"According to the doctrines put forth by the President, although Congress may have passed a law, and although the Supreme Court may have pronounced it constitutional, yet it is, nevertheless, no law at all, if he in his good pleasure, sees fit to deny its effect; in other words, to repeal and annul it. Sir, no President, and no public man, ever before advanced such doctrines in the face of the nation. There never was before a moment in which any President would have been tolerated in asserting such claim to despotic power.... If these opinions of the President be maintained, there is an end of all law and all judicial authority. Statutes are but recommendations, judgments no more than opinions. Both are equally destitute of binding force. Such a universal power as is now claimed for him--a power of judging over the laws and over the decisions of the tribunal--is nothing else than pure despotism. If conceded to him, it makes him at once what Louis the Fourteenth proclaimed himself to be when he said 'I am the State.'" Now where was his warrant for these scandalous denunciations? Was it to be found in the words "every officer," etc. to which I have referred? If so, common fairness required that he should have set them forth so that the readers of his speech might judge for themselves what the President intended by them. This he was too sagacious to do, for if he named them he was bound to give the whole paragraph. If he omitted this the President's friends would have pointed out the deception. If he gave the whole his readers would have seen that General Jackson could not have used the words in the sense attributed to them by Mr. Webster. In this dilemma he contented himself with substituting bold and reckless assumption for proof. Mr. Clay was less cautious, as it was his nature to be; he extracted the obnoxious words without the context, and founded upon them charges like these,--charges by which none who read his speech would have been misled if he had quoted the message fairly:--"There are some parts of his message that ought to excite deep alarm, and that especially in which the President announces that each public officer may interpret the Constitution as he pleases. His language is 'each public officer, who takes an oath to support the Constitution, swears that he will support it as he understands it and not as it is understood by others.' 'The opinion of the judges has no more authority over Congress than the opinion of Congress has over the judges; and on that point the President is independent of both.' Now, Mr. President, I conceive, with great deference, that the President has mistaken the purport of the oath to support the Constitution of the United States. No one swears to support it as he understands it, but to support it simply as it is in truth. All men are bound to obey the laws, of which the Constitution is the supreme; but must they obey them as they are, or as they understand them? If the obligation of obedience is