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colors how liable to abuse it was. Still not one proposed to take it from you. The most anxious only asked to check it by requiring a two-thirds vote.
This proposition the Convention refused to accept; the utmost the Convention would recommend to the people was, that the judge should have notice and liberty to defend himself.
Even this limitation on your power the people refused to adopt.
They were fully warned, and deliberately, on mature reflection, decided that it was safe and wise to intrust you with unlimited discretion in this respect.
With such a page in our history, it is not competent for the press or the friends of Judge Loring to argue that no such power ought to have been given you, and that it is too dangerous to be used.
The people alone have the right to decide that question, and they have decided it. When, after full deliberation, they gave you the power, they said, in effect, that occasions might arise requiring its exercise, and on such fitting occasions they wished it exercised.
Doubtless, Gentlemen, this is a grave power, and one to be used only on important occasions.
We are bound to show you, not light and trifling reasons for the removal of Judge Loring, but such grave and serious reasons, such weighty cause, as will justify your interference, and make this use of your authority strengthen rather than weaken the proper independence of the bench.
Indeed, the power is in itself a wise, good, and necessary one, and should be lodged somewhere in every government.
The Boston papers, in all their arguments on this point, take it for granted that the people are to be always under guardianship,--that government is a grand Probate Court to prevent the people — the insane and always under-age people — from wasting their own property and cutting their own throat.
Not such is the theory of republican institutions.
The true theory is, that the people came of age on the fourth day of July, 1776, and can be
Lee and Shepard, 1891.
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