vote had been taken in respect to each particular act included within
the general terms the accusers of the President might on any such vote
have been found in the minority.

Still further to exemplify this feature of the proceeding, it is
important to be remarked that the resolution as originally offered
to the Senate specified with adequate precision certain acts of the
President which it denounced as a violation of the Constitution and
laws, and that it was not until the very close of the debate, and
when perhaps it was apprehended that a majority might not sustain the
specific accusation contained in it, that the resolution was so modified
as to assume its present form. A more striking illustration of the
soundness and necessity of the rules which forbid vague and indefinite
generalities and require a reasonable certainty in all judicial
allegations, and a more glaring instance of the violation of those
rules, has seldom been exhibited.

In this view of the resolution it must certainly be regarded not as a
vindication of any particular provision of the law or the Constitution,
but simply as an official rebuke or condemnatory sentence, too general
and indefinite to be easily repelled, but yet sufficiently precise to
bring into discredit the conduct and motives of the Executive. But
whatever it may have been intended to accomplish, it is obvious that
the vague, general, and abstract form of the resolution is in perfect
keeping with those other departures from first principles and settled
improvements in jurisprudence so properly the boast of free countries
in modern times. And it is not too much to say of the whole of these
proceedings that if they shall be approved and sustained by an
intelligent people, then will that great contest with arbitrary power
which had established in statutes, in bills of rights, in sacred