"Having such means of knowledge as to the facts, enabling it to ascertain whether a choice has been made by the electoral colleges, it is also expressly vested with a power and duty to act exclusively and conclusively in the event that no person be found to have been chosen by a majority of the votes of those colleges. The House acquires jurisdiction by the fact specified in the Constitution. The assent of the Senate to the existence of that fact is nowhere prescribed or required. No judgment, certification, or act of any official body is interposed as a condition to the assuming of its jurisdiction by the House. When the House has once acted in such a case, no review of its action nor any appeal from its decision is provided for in the Constitution. It is difficult to see why the House in such a case, like all tribunals of original jurisdiction and subject to no appeal, is not the exclusive judge of the fact and the law on which its jurisdiction rests. It was the fear that the Senate might lead a resistance to the rightful judgment of the House, and that General Grant would sustain this revolutionary policy with the army and navy and the militia of the great States in which the Republicans had possession of the State Governments that deterred the assertion of the rights of the House of Representatives, and induced its vote for and acquiescence in the electoral commission. "But without speculating upon causes or motives, one thing is certain. The House of Representatives did not elect Mr. Tilden in the manner prescribed by the Constitution. On the other hand, it did concur with the Senate in anticipating and preventing the contingency in which it might have had to act, and in providing beforehand an expedient which was to make its own action in supplying the failure of an election by the colleges impossible. It adopted the electoral law and went through all the forms of the electoral scheme. True, it afterwards passed a declaratory resolution condemning the action of the electoral commission, and asserting that Mr. Tilden had been duly elected. But the Constitution had not provided that a man should or could take office as President on a declaratory resolution of the House of Representatives. If that resolution could have had full effect to abrogate the electoral law which the House had assisted to enact it would have still been a nullity as an exercise of the constitutional power of the House to elect. It created no warrant of authority to Mr. Tilden to take the oath of office.