etched a drag-net over the whole surface of perished
pamphlets, indiscreet sermons, frothy paragraphs, and fuming popular
addresses,--over whatever the pulpit in its moments of alarm, the press
in its heats, and parties in their extravagance, have severally thrown
off in times of general excitement and violence. He has thus swept
together a mass of such things as, but that they are now old and cold,
the public health would have required him rather to leave in their
state of dispersion. For a good long hour or two, we had the unbroken
pleasure of listening to the honorable member, while he recited with his
usual grace and spirit, and with evident high gusto, speeches,
pamphlets, addresses, and all the _et caeteras_ of the political press,
such as warm heads produce in warm times; and such as it would be
"discomfiture" indeed for any one, whose taste did not delight in that
sort of reading, to be obliged to peruse. This is his war. This it is to
carry war into the enemy's country. It is in an invasion of this sort,
that he flatters himself with the expectation of gaining laurels fit to
adorn a Senator's brow!

Mr. President, I shall not, it will not, I trust, be expected that I
should, either now or at any time, separate this farrago into parts, and
answer and examine its components. I shall barely bestow upon it all a
general remark or two. In the run of forty years, Sir, under this
Constitution, we have experienced sundry successive violent party
contests. Party arose, indeed, with the Constitution itself, and, in
some form or other, has attended it through the greater part of its
history. Whether any other constitution than the old Articles of
Confederation was desirable, was itself a question on which parties
divided; if a new constitution were framed, what powers should be given
to it was another question; and when it had been formed, what was, in
fact, the just extent of the powers actually conferred was a third.
Parties, as we know, existed under the first administration, as
distinctly marked as those which have manifested themselves at any
subsequent period. The contest immediately preceding the political
change in 1801, and that, again, which existed at the commencement of
the late war, are other instances of party excitement, of something more
than usual strength and intensity. In all these conflicts there was, no
doubt, much of violence on both and all sides. It would be impossible,
if one had a fancy for such