The Constitutional Power Of Impeachment.
The power conferred by the Constitution upon Congress to impeach and remove the President for cause, is unquestionably a wise provision. The natural tendency of the most patriotic of men, in the exercise of power in great public emergencies, is to overstep the line of absolute safety, in the conscientious conviction that a departure from strict constitutional or legal limitations is demanded by the public welfare.

The danger in such departures, even upon apparent necessity, if condoned or permitted by public judgment is in the establishment of precedents whereby greater and more dangerous infractions of organic law may be invited, tolerated, and justified, till government takes on a form of absolutism in one form or another, fatal to free institutions, fatal to a government of law, and fatal to popular liberty.

On the other hand, a too ready resort to the power of impeachment as a remedial agent--the deposition of a public officer in the absence of proof of the most positive and convincing character of the impeachability of the offense alledged, naturally tends to the other extreme, till public officers may become by common consent removable by impeachment upon insufficient though popular charges--even upon partisan differences and on sharply contested questions of public administration.