in order to enable the executive department to decide whether the public
money was longer safe in its hands. The limited power of the Secretary
of the Treasury over the subject disabled him from making the
investigation as fully and satisfactorily as it could be done by a
committee of the House of Representatives, and hence the President
desired the assistance of Congress to obtain for the Treasury Department
a full knowledge of all the facts which were necessary to guide his
judgment. But it was not his purpose, as the language of his message
will show, to ask the representatives of the people to assume a
responsibility which did not belong to them and relieve the executive
branch of the Government from the duty which the law had imposed upon
it. It is due to the President that his object in that proceeding should
be distinctly understood, and that he should acquit himself of all
suspicion of seeking to escape from the performance of his own duties or
of desiring to interpose another body between himself and the people in
order to avoid a measure which he is called upon to meet. But although
as an act of justice to himself he disclaims any design of soliciting
the opinion of the House of Representatives in relation to his own
duties in order to shelter himself from responsibility under the
sanction of their counsel, yet he is at all times ready to listen to
the suggestions of the representatives of the people, whether given
voluntarily or upon solicitation, and to consider them with the profound
respect to which all will admit that they are justly entitled. Whatever
may be the consequences, however, to himself, he must finally form his
own judgment where the Constitution and the law make it his duty to
decide, and must act accordingly; and he is bound to suppose that such
a course on his part will never be regarded by that elevated body as a
mark of disrespect to itself, but that they will, on the contrary,
esteem it the strongest evidence he can give of his fixed resolution
conscientiously to discharge his duty to them and the country.