"The present position of the administration is a sorrowful commentary upon the broad democracy of its professions. In theory, the people have the right and ability to do anything—in practice, we are verging rapidly to the one man power.
"The President, the ostensible head of the national Democrats, is eagerly striving to concentrate power in his own hands, and thus exclude both the people and their representatives from the actual affairs of government. Having emptied the treasury, which he found full, and living precariously upon the borrowed money, he now demands of Congress to intrust to his unchecked discretion the war power, the purse, and the sword.
"First, he asks Congress to authorize him, by statute, to use the army to take military possession of northern Mexico, and hold it under his protectorate, and as a security for debts due to our citizens. Civil possession would not answer, for that exposes him, as in the case of Kansas, to be annoyed by a factious Congress, and a rebellious territorial legislature.
"Second, not content with this, he demands discretionary power to use the army and navy in the South also, in blockading the coast and marching his troops into the interior of Mexico and New Granada, to protect our citizens against all evil doers along the transit route of Tehuantepec and Panama, and he and his supporters claim this enormous power upon the ground that, in this particular at least, he ought to be the equal of the greatest monarch of Europe. They forget that our fathers limited the power of the President by design, and for the reason that they had found out, by sad experience, that the monarchs of Europe were too strong for freedom.
"Third, in strict pursuance of his doctrine, first publicly announced from Ostend, he demands of Congress to hand over to him thirty millions of dollars, to be used at his discretion, to facilitate his acquisition of Cuba. Facilitate—how? Perhaps it would be imprudent to tell.
"Add to all this the fact (as yet unexplained) that one of the largest naval armaments which sailed from our coasts is now operating in South America, ostensibly against a poor little republic far up the Plata River, to settle some little quarrel between the two Presidents. If Congress had been polite enough to grant the President's demand of the sword and the purse against Mexico, Central America and Cuba, this navy, its duty done at the South, might be made, on its way home, to arrive in the Gulf very opportunely, to aid the 'Commander-in-Chief' in the acquisition of some very valuable territory.
"I allude to these facts with no malice against Mr. Buchanan, but as evidences of the dangerous change which is now obviously sought to be made in the practical working of the Government—the concentration of power in the hands of the President—and the dangerous policy, now almost established, of looking abroad for temporary glory and aggrandizement, instead of looking at home for all the purposes of good government—peaceable, moderate, economical—protecting all interests, and by a fixed policy calling into safe exercise all the talents and industry of our people, and thus steadily advancing our country in everything which can make a nation great, happy, and permanent.
"The rapid increase of the public expenditures (and that, too, under the management of statesmen professing to be peculiarly economical) is an alarming sign of corruption and decay.
"The increase bears no fair proportion to the growth and expansion of the country, but looks rather like wanton waste and criminal negligence. The ordinary objects are not materially augmented—the army and navy remained on a low peace establishment—the military defences are little, if at all enlarged—the improvement of harbors, lakes and rivers is abandoned, and the Pacific railway is not only not begun, but its very location is scrambled for by hungry sections, which succeed in nothing but mutual defeat. In short, the money, to an enormous amount (I am told at the rate of from eighty to one hundred millions a year), is gone, and we have little or nothing to show for it.
"In profound peace with foreign nations, and surrounded by the proofs of national growth and individual prosperity, the treasury, by less than two years of mismanagement, is made bankrupt, and the government itself is living from hand to mouth on bills of credit and borrowed money! This humiliating state of things could hardly happen, if the men in power were both honest and wise. The democratic economists in Congress confess that they have recklessly wasted the public revenue; they confess it by refusing to raise the tariff to meet the present exigency, and by insisting that they can replenish the exhausted treasury and support the government, in credit and efficiency, by simply striking off their former extravagances.