WRITINGS OF 5AM HOUSTON, 1858
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are you to determine who shall be accepted as a member of that House? Where is your constitutional authority to say that that one of the three who received the highest number of votes shall be admitted? I cannot find any such authority; and, not finding it, I shall not vote for such a provision. Whatever I can do, under the sanction of the Constitution and the laws, towards a new State, I will do for it with a great deal of pleasure; but when I am called upon to violate the Constitution and the laws, I cannot and I will not do it.
1 Congressional Globe, 1857-1858, Part 2, p. 1418.
REMARKS CONCERNING TH~ NEW REGIMENTS BILL1
April 1, 1858. Mr. Houston. I do not know that it is necessary to say much on this subject, and I am not disposed to occupy any time unneces- sarily. If I understood the honorable Senator from Georgia, he said that, if volunteer companies could be procured, such as are enrolled in the towns and cities, they be qualified, perhaps, as well as regulars, to discharge this duty. Now, sir, just look to the probability of volunteers of any description being immediately prepared for service. Those volunteers are not in the habit of mustering more than fifty-two times in a year; so that a daily habit of mustering for twenty-six days in succession would qualify them as well as the fifty-two days in the course of the year that they have been drilled; and men of every degree of aptitude, in the course of twenty-five or thirty days, will not only understand the manual and the step, but they ·will understand the evolutions of companies and regiments remarkably well, and so as to render them perfectly efficient. The honorable Senator from Georgia further said. they woulrl do very well to guard trains, and such like matters, but they would not do for war. Why, sir, that. is a very strange notion. I believe that in all our wars, from the Revolution down to this day, the grandest achievements have been made by the militia, or by volunteers. The army of the United States in the Revolu- tion was nothing more than an army of volunteers. The regulars are mustered for a certain period; but if they have careful and intelligent officers to drill them, they are as well prepared for all the duties of a soldier in six months, as they are at the expiration of their five years' service, except as regards economy in the details of living and camp police. The Senator from Georgia says that these volunteers will do to guard the
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