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OBSERVATIONS

ON THE LATE

PRESIDENTIAL VETO,

TOGETHER WITH

A PLAN FOR A CHANGE OF THE CONSTITUTION

RELATIVE TO THIS POWER.

BOSTON:

JAMES MUNROE AND COMPANY.

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Entered according to act of Congress, in the year 1842, by JAMES MUNROE & COMPANY, in the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the District of Massachusetts.

CAMBRIDGE PRESS:

LYMAN THURSTON AND WILLIAM TORRY.

W

PRESIDENTIAL VETO.

THE amendment, which it is the principal object of this pamphlet to propose, of the provision of the Constitution which relates to the Veto power of the President, was first suggested by that proposed by Mr. Clay in the Senate at the present session of Congress. The objects of that provision are at present little understood generally, or rather have been nearly forgotten, and its effects, if it be literally construed, according to the mode of interpretation which now prevails, little appreciated. The defects of a written Constitution can only be corrected or supplied, in the same manner that a Constitution which is the result of precedent, of custom, and of a consent gradually and occasionally given, is formed; by the effect upon the community of particular examples, bringing home to every man's business and affairs the bearing and the relationship of the diverse interests and institutions, which are the elements of the social system, and suggesting the proper mode of combining and harmonizing them. To create or to alter its fundamental laws, to overcome that instinctive hesitation at change, which is always great in proportion to the importance of that change, requires a general agitation and movement of the whole society, which can only be the result of a grievance universally and strongly felt throughout the community.

The question of the United States Bank, which was that on which Mr. Clay relied to produce that state of the public mind, in which it might be impregnated with the proposed change, did not prove on experiment to be of an interest suf

ficiently extensive or sufficiently exciting for that purpose. Amid the ruin of the old banking system, and of the United States Bank especially, which was just disclosing to the light some of the most alarming and revolting secrets of its internal mechanism, a serious doubt began to be entertained as to the expediency of a new Bank, and a general apathy felt on this subject, even in the ranks of the Whig party, which they did not care to express.

If, however, the power, of which the United States Bank has been the first victim, (whether deservedly or not, it matters not, but, as I believe, at least fortunately,) is as ill advised, and as mischievous, as I think, it cannot fail sooner or later to find a subject for its exemplification, if it has not done so already, of which the interest and importance shall produce that state of the public mind, which has been described as necessary to the accomplishment of so momentous a change in our Constitution; and the character and political position of the present President seem so admirably and exactly contrived to make him the instrument of a consummation so devoutly to be wished, that I cannot doubt, if we may impute any design to the seeming caprices of destiny, that this is to be the result of that extraordinary combination of accidents, which have made Mr. John Tyler President of the United States of America.

Extremely ignorant both of the science and the art of government, both of its general principles and practical rules, and of all those subjects of finance and of political economy connected with it; having a stock of political information and political principles made up entirely of those commonplaces which have happened, in a public life of some twenty years, as they were bandied about from party to party, to fall among his articles of faith, with a mind extremely illogical, and apparently incapable of any profound or elaborate reasoning, he finds himself at the head of the most grotesque, the most illassorted, the most disorderly rabble of opinions that were ever assembled in the same creed. To these, as generally

happens to men of narrow understandings, who have great pride with no profoundness of opinion, he considers himself unconditionally pledged. Endowed with an inordinate and almost inconceivable vanity, the first germ of which he must have received from nature, but which, no doubt, has gathered fresh strength from the effect produced on a mind of ordinary powers by a success in life out of all proportion to his abilities, he is equally inaccessible to argument and accessible to flattery; obstinate and suspicious; at the same time ready to go the greatest lengths to maintain his opinions, and yet fearful of the consequences; incapable of forming any opinions of his own, while he adheres obstinately to those of other men, without even the power of modifying them; it is impossible to present the picture of a character better calculated, in the exercise of an ill advised power, to realize all the possible objections to it, and to render it both odious and contemptible. A man of tact, of ability, or of brilliancy might contrive either so to exercise such a power as to palliate the objections to it, or to give such specious reasons for it as to make it appear to be justifiable. Of an ambitious man it might be said, that the fault was not in the Constitution, but in the ambition which might equally abuse any other prerogative. But Mr. Tyler will not fail to prove at each exercise of this prerogative, if he has not done so already, that a certain degree of stupidity, without any definite scheme of ambition, is all that is necessary, with this provision of the Constitution, to establish a temporary dictatorship; and will be sure to abuse so dangerous a power, in a way to make it as mischievous and as annoying as possible.

Any argument, which should defend this last instance of the exercise of the Veto, cannot stop short of this principle, that whatever the President, acting as a Member of Congress, may vote against, acting as President he may veto; that the same reasons, that are good as grounds for the decision of each member of Congress, are good and sufficient ones for

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