hrowing the dogma of strict
construction, he committed the General Government irrevocably to
internal improvements. Condemning the worthless system of paper
money imposed upon the people by irresponsible State banks, he
stood firmly for a national currency, and he foreshadowed if he
did not reach the paper money which is based to-day on the credit
and the strength of the government.

Mr. Clay possessed extraordinary sagacity in public affairs, seeing
and foreseeing where others were blinded by ignorance or prejudice.
He was a statesman by intuition, finding a remedy before others
could discover the disease. His contemporaries appreciated his
rare endowments. On the day of his first entrance into the House
of Representatives he was chosen Speaker, though but thirty-four
years of age. This was all the more remarkable because the House
was filled with men of recognized ability, who had been long in
the public service. It was rendered still more striking by the
fact that Mr. Clay was from the far West, from one of the only two
States whose frontiers reached the Mississippi. In the entire
House there were only fifteen members from the Western side of the
Alleghanies. He was re-elected Speaker in every Congress so long
as he served as representative. He entered the Senate at thirty,
and died a member of it in his seventy-sixth year. He began his
career in that body during the Presidency of Jefferson in 1806,
and closed it under the Presidency of Fillmore in 1852. Other
senators have served a longer time than Mr. Clay, but he alone at
periods so widely separated. Other men have excelled him in specific
powers, but in the rare combination of qualities which constitute
at once the matchless leader of party and the statesman of consummate
ability and inexhaustible resource, he has never been surpassed by
any man speaking the English tongue.

[NOTE.--The Committee of Thirteen, to which reference is made on
p. 94, and which attained such extraordinary importance at the
time, was originally suggested by Senator Foote of Mississippi.
His first proposition was somewhat novel from its distinct recognition
of the sectional character of the issues involved. He proposed
that the committee be chosen by ballot, that six members of it
should be taken from the free States and six members from the slave
States, and that the twelve thus chosen should select a thirteenth
member who should be chairman of the committee. All proposi