by a message from President Cleveland, dated March 1. 1886, in which the President claimed that these papers in the Attorney-General's Department were in no sense upon its files, but were deposited there for his convenience. He said: "I suppose if I desired to take them into my custody I might do so with entire propriety, and if I saw fit to destroy them no one could complain." Continuing, the President says that the demands of the Senate "assume the right to sit in judgment upon the exercise of my exclusive discretion and Executive function, for which I am solely responsible to the people from whom I have so lately received the sacred trust of office."

He refers to the laws upon which the Senate based its demand and said: "After an existence of nearly twenty years of almost innocuous desuetude these laws are brought forth-apparently the repealed as well as the unrepealedand put in the way of an Executive who is willing, if permitted, to attempt an improvement in the methods of administration. The Constitutionality of these laws is by no means admitted."

The President seemed to forget that he had taken action under those laws, and had expressly cited them as the authority for his action, in his message announcing the suspension of the official.

The controversy waxed warm in the Senate, and in the press throughout the country. The effect of it was that the confirmation of Mr. Cleveland's nominees for important offices was postponed for several months, in some cases eight to ten, but as they were exercising their functions under temporary appointments, it made no difference to them. When they were at last confirmed by the Senate, they received commissions dated from the appointment which took place after the advice and consent of the Senate. So the four years, for which they could hold office, began to run then, and when a new Administration of different politics came into power, they held their office for a period considerably more than four years, except a few who were actually removed by President Harrison.

I do not think the people cared much about the dispute.

The sympathy was rather with President Cleveland. The people, both Republicans and Democrats, expected that the political control of the more important offices would be changed when a new party came into power, and considered Mr. Edmunds's Constitutional argument as a mere ingenious device to protract the day when their political fate should overtake the Republican officials.

I united with the majority of the Committee in the report, for the reasons I have stated above. I still think the position of the Senate right, and that of the President wrong. But I never agreed to the claim that the Senate had anything to do with the President's power of removal. So I took the first opportunity to introduce a bill repealing the provisions of the statute relating to the tenure of office, which interfered with the President's power of removal, so that we might go back again to the law which had been in force from the foundation of the Government, and in the controversy with President Jackson. A majority of the Republicans had attempted to do that, as I have said, in the first session of Congress under President Grant. But it had been defeated by the Senate. So I introduced in the December session, 1886, a bill which became a law March 3, 1887, as follows:

"Be enacted, etc., That sections 1767, 1768, 1769, 1770, 1771, and 1772 of the Revised Statutes of the United States are hereby repealed.

"Sec. 2. This repeal shall not affect any officer heretofore suspended under the provisions of said sections, or any designation, nomination or appointment heretofore made by virtue of the provisions thereof.

"Approved, March 3, 1887."

But the blood of my Republican associates was up. I got a few Republican votes for my Bill. It passed the House by a vote of 172 to 67. Every Massachusetts Representative voted for the Bill, as did Speaker Reed. But in general the votes against it were Republican votes. Governor Long made an able speech in its favor.

In the Senate three Republicans only voted with me. Among the nays were several Senators who, as members of the House, had voted for a Bill involving the same principle in 1869. Mr. Evarts, though absent at the time of the vote, declared his approval of the Bill in debate; and so, I think, did Mr. Dawes, although of that I am not sure. Edmunds opposed it with all his might and main.

Mr.

Mr. Sherman, always a good friend of mine, remonstrated with me. He asked me with great seriousness, if I was aware of the extent of the feeling among the Republicans of the Senate at my undertaking to act in opposition to them on this and one or two other important matters, to which he alluded. I replied that I must of course do what seemed to be my duty, and that in my opinion I was rendering a great service to the Republican Party in getting rid of the controversy in which the people sympathized generally with the Democrats, and that I thought the gentlemen who differed from me, would come to my way of thinking pretty The result proved the soundness of my judgment. I do not think a man can be found in the Senate now who would wish to go back to the law which was passed to put fetters on the limbs of Andrew Johnson. I have asked several gentlemen. who voted against the repeal whether they did not think so, and they all now agree that the meas、 ure was eminently wise and right. The opposition to the statute of 1887 was but the dying embers of the old fires of the Johnson controversy.

soon.

CHAPTER XII

FISHERIES

IF, on looking back, I were to select the things which I have done in public life in which I take most satisfaction, they would be, the speech in the Senate on the Fisheries Treaty, July 10, 1888, the letter denouncing the A. P. A., a secret, political association, organized for the purpose of ostracizing our Catholic fellow-citizens, and the numerous speeches, letters and magazine articles against the subjugation of the Philippine Islands.

I do not think any one argument, certainly that my argument, caused the defeat of the Fisheries Treaty, negotiated by Mr. Joseph Chamberlain and Mr. Bayard during Mr. Cleveland's first Administration. The argument against What it was too strong not to have prevailed without any one uiter man's contribution to it; and the Senate was not so strongly t! inclined to support President Cleveland as to give a twothirds majority to a measure, unless it seemed clearly for the public interest. He had his Republican opponents to reckon with, and the Democrats in the Senate disliked him very much, and gave him a feeble and half-hearted support.

The question of our New England fisheries has interested the people of the country, especially of New England, from our very early history. Burke spoke of them before the Revolutionary War, as exciting even then the envy of England. One of the best known and most eloquent passages in all literature is his description of the enterprise of our fathers. Burke adds to that description:

"When I reflect upon the effects, when I see how profitable they have been to us, I feel all the pride of power sink, and all presumption in the wisdom of human contrivances

melt and die away within me. My rigor relents. I pardon something to the spirit of Liberty.”

The War of the Revolution, of course, interrupted for a time the fisheries of the American colonies. But the fishermen were not idle. They manned the little Navy whose exploits have never yet received from history its due meed of praise. They furnished the ships' companies of Manly and Tucker and Biddle and Abraham Whipple. They helped Paul Jones to strike terror into St. George's Channel. In 1776, in the first year of the Revolutionary War, American privateers, most of them manned by our fishermen, captured three hundred and forty-two British vessels.

The fisheries came up again after the war. Mr. Jefferson commended them to the favor of the nation in an elaborate and admirable report. He said that before the war 8,000 men and 52,000 tons of shipping were annually employed by Massachusetts in the cod and whale fisheries. England and France made urgent efforts and offered large bounties to get our fishermen to move over there.

For a long time the fisheries were aided by direct bounties. Later the policy of protection has been substituted.

John Adams has left on record that when he went abroad as our representative in 1778, and again when the Treaty of 1783 was negotiated, his knowledge of the fisheries and his sense of their importance were what induced him to take the mission. He declared that unless our claims were fully recognized, the States would carry on the war alone. He said:

"Because the people of New England, besides the natural claim of mankind to the gifts of Providence on their coast, are specially entitled to the fishery by their charters, which have never been declared forfeited."

In the debate on the articles of peace in the House of Lords, Lord Loughborough, the ablest lawyer of his party, said:

"The fishery on the shores retained by Britain is in the next article not ceded, but recognized as a right inherent in