Mr. HOWE. I mean to say as a matter within my own knowledge that from the time the rebellion was inaugurated it was useless for us in the West to assign as a cause for removal that a man had voted for Douglas or for Bell or for Breckinridge or for anybod against Mr. Lincoln. If the fact were. to be, that in spite of his party affiliations during the fall before, in the spring and after the Jandard of revolt was raised he was then under the flag and willing to defend it, he was safe in his office so far as Mr. Lincoln was concerned. But before that time undoubtedly there were a great many removed from office by Mr. Lincoln for the reason that they had not supported Mr. Lincoln's election; and I find no fault with that. I find no fault with such an exercise of patronage as that at any time. When the 2 great parties of the country make up their issue and go to the people upon it, if the people decide in favor of one set of measures and against another I concede their right to have not only a President who is in favor of their system and of their measures, but the right to have a postmaster, and the right to have collectors, and the right to have assessors and Indian agents, and all kinds of civil employees of their way of thinking. I find no special fault with that doctrine, which I believe has been preached only for 30 or 40 years, that to the victors belong the spoils; but the victory which entitles a man or a party to the spoils is a victory which is achieved by the assent of the American people; it is not a victory which is attained by desertion. If GenlGrant, instead of moving on the lines of General Lee before Richmond had moved over and joined the rebel forces, I do not think that would have been such a victory over the Federal flag as would have authorized Grant's troops to plunder his own camp; and when a President leaves the party which elected him and goes over to the party which refused to elect him, I do not think that is one of those heroic victories which authorizes him to turn over the patronage of the country to the few followers who gather about him.. The employment of this patronage has had the effect, not merely to change the character, but to change the very occupations of the President. By law he is the Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the U.S.; but you no longer see your President employed in studying the part of war. He is the organ of the American nation in commu nicating with other nations and potentates of the earth; but you no longer see the President employed in studying international law. He is the head of the nation; he knows that the nation is staggering under a load of debt; he knows that it is opPressed as it never has been opPressed before; but you do not see the President employing his time in the study of systems of finance or systems of labor or systems of economy. He has no time for these things. His time is absorbed in weighing the relative merits of rival candidates for a collectorship or for a postoffice. But, sir, it has had a worse effect than either of these, perhaps than all of these, upon the President. It has gone very far to drag him out of the sphere to which the Constitution assigned him, and to plant him in the very sphere which the Constitution denied to him and assigned to the Congress of the U.S. He is no longer content with the labor of executing the American will and enforcing American law. The President seems to be mainly ambitious of making American law and of dictating to the American will. The bold est attempt (though not the 1st, I am obliged to admit,) we have ever seen of this we have seen within the past year and a half and during the Administration of the Present President. You have seen the President enter boldly upon the field of legislation. You have seen him go into ten great American communities, which he says are States, which had the lineaments of States, which had governments over them; you have seen him deliberately take those organizations all to pieces, without any authority of law in the world, and you have seen him take the very same may terial out of which they were built and build new organizations; and then you have seen him turn around and confront the American Con5 and tell them that they must recognize ose organizations which he made himself, and clothe them with the prerogatives of American States; and when you hesitated to do that, when you refused to do that, you have seen him turn to the American people, your constituents, the men whose rePresentatives you are, and tell them to remove you from your places; and he really hoped to do it, he really hoped to seeure a verdict of your constituents against your acts. What was the ground of that hope of his? imply that you left in his hands this patronage. He was made to believe that the American people would follow that. He was made to believe that they would give up the eause for which they had been struggling for 6 years, the cause in which they had poured out so much blood and sacrificed so much life, rather than to give up those emoluments which by your enactments and not by his, are attached to these several offices. I say this; I think I am warranted in saying it by the very logic of every thing that transpired during that canvass. You know that one of his Cabinet ministers was said to have proclaimed during the last session of Congress that no man could partake of the President's bread and butter unless he would support the President's policy; and I cut yesterday from a o of my own State a letter purporting to have been writteen by a gentleman I know very well, a resident of Wisconsin, a very able man, a very adroit politician, written on the 24th of February last, which, as it contains a more explicit statement of this policy and this reasoning than I can frame in the course of my remarks, I beg leave to produce. It is dated Milwaukee, February 24, 1866, and is as follows: “MY DEARSIR: Inclosed pleasefind checkon NewYork for 30 dollars, the amount of copies 1,000 of your greatspeech. Mr. Sholes and myself have sent them thoroughly over the State. “Theyetof of the Freedmen's Bureau bill is popular here. The ratification meetingwas a most decided success. I like the speech of the President on the It is straightforward and to people the point. The can understand it, and it explains somethings that might before have seemed mysterious to them. I inclose you a so from the p?o, of the postmaster at Whitewater. How long is this state of things to last? Are you and the President to by your be hunted down own officials? My advice is that a few say only 2 or 3 removals take plage in just this State to show that lightning can strike. In every ihnosntaonracbely the places should be filled by men who have served in the war and who votedfor Lincoln and Johnson.” Offices were not to be given to those who supported the President's policy, but to be given to those who would leave the Republican party and go over to the other party to support the President's policy. "A little of this kind of erable more of medicine newand consid it before the 1st of Septemberwill unseat How E certain, and make Cobb, PAINE, SAwYER, and McIne or's condition precarious. This State nextfall will go for Johnson by from 15 to 20,000, if judicicus!y, andmuch matters are only managed of of this dependsupon the action the Administration in defending itself. Yours truly, A. NOONAN. Hon. J. R. Doolittle, Washington. Now, Mr. President, it is no answer to say that these friends of the President or that the President himself was mistaken in his calculation. I know they were mistaken; I knew well enough they would be mistaken; but the fact that such calculations can be based upon this employment of the patronage which you, and not the Constitution or the makers of the Constitution, put in his hands; the fact that such calculations can be based upon your action is enough to cause you to hesitate, to consider, and reverse what you have done heretofore; reverse the whole of it, and not part of it. This whole enterprise was a plain violation: athte Constitution. The Constitution declares “All legislative powers herein granted shall be wested in a Congress of the U.S., which to: consist of a Senate and HoRep.” In defiance of that plain declaration of the instrument, you saw a President who thought he had more legislative power than all of you, and it was because, and only because, he had this patronage in his hands. Mr. President, it is the purpose of this bill to restrict this power of removal; but when you assert the power to restrict it you affirm the power to destroy it. If the President has by the Constitution the power to remove one officer whom you have helped to make, he has power to remove every one of them, and you ought to acknowledge it and not attempt to restrict it. If he cannot remove the whole, he cannot remove anyone without your permission; but when you affirm your power to take from him the right to remove one officer, you do in effect declare the right to take from him the power to remove anyone and every one. Having asserted the power to restrict, I ask the American Senate, in the name of Heaven, why not destroy this power at once, put an end to it, to the whole of it? I ask the Senate to destroy this power be. cause it is only by destroying, not by restrictin it, that you can accomplish any real good, by destroying it you will return the American President to the sphere of labor and of duty assigned to him by the Constitution, and you will restore his subordinates to their manhood, of which they have not caught sight during their official terms. The bill proposes, as I said, to restrict this power of removal. The bill proposes to deny to him the right to remove anyone of the officers who have been appointed by and with the advice and consent op the Senate, except the heads of Depts. I ask you why except the heads of Depts? have listened from the beginning of this discussion for a sound and sensible reason for this distinction. I am bound to say, and yet I wish to say it with the utmost respect for the great ability of those who have participated in the discussion, that I have been compelled to wait so far in vain. I have not heard a reason which has affected my understanding. Very likely the fault is in my understanding and not in the reasoning employed; but after all I must, out of justice to my Maker, insist that if you have good reasons, I have understanding enough to comprefiend them when you fairly state them to me. It was said, indeed it was said by my friendfrom Oregon, [Mr. WILLIAMS,) that we ought to leave the President so much authority as to remove the head of a Dept out of respect to the Presidential office. Why, sir, the earlier Presidents of the U.S. though they had this power did not exert it, and I never have understood that they fell short in the respect of the American people because they did not exert it. The later Presidents of the U.S. having no more power have exerted it, and I have not discovered that they have gained any in the respect of the American people because of it. If it be so, that respect for the Presidential office depends upon the patronage he has to distribute, your whole bill is a blunder, if it is not a crime. If you cannot entertain respect for an officer who cannot give you “bread and butter, ” for God’s sake do not take any of this authority from the Present President; he is the last one we can afford to strip of any of his titles to respect. We never had one that we could afford to detract from less. Reverse our action on this bill, pile up patronage in is hands, if you cannot respect a President without it. For myself, I know I will never respect a POTUS, nor j.American people respect another POTUS, until you turn him from the work which I called the other day the peddling of patronage, and turn him again to the discharge of his legitimate duties. Let us see once more an American President standing up as the 1st magistrate of the nation, doing justice, and commanding justice to be done, not as the organ of a party, but as the minister of a nation. Then I shall begin once more to respect the Presidential office, never until that time. It is whispered that I shall have to wait a long time for that day. I shall have to wait until I find an American legislature which will undo deliberately the work which the 1st American Legislature carelessly did, a work which they never would have done, and you know they never would, if they could have foreseen the consequences of their own action. When James Madison stood there and defended the provision to confer this power upon the President, you know he did not conceive that we should come to electing Presidents for no other purpose than to dispense patronage; you know he did not conceive that we should come to elect Presidents who would confer it for the exPress purpose of rewarding partisan political friends, and you know he said that whenever that was done it would constitute a ground for impeachment.