talents
concealed his defects and glorified his foibles; and Kentucky rejoiced
in him, loved him, trusted him, and sent him forth to represent her in
the national council.

During the first thirteen years of Henry Clay's active life as a
politician,--from his twenty-first to his thirty-fourth year,--he
appears in politics only as the eloquent champion of the policy of Mr.
Jefferson, whom he esteemed the first and best of living men. After
defending him on the stump and aiding him in the Kentucky Legislature,
he was sent in 1806, when he was scarcely thirty, to fill for one term
a seat in the Senate of the United States, made vacant by the
resignation of one of the Kentucky Senators. Mr. Jefferson received
his affectionate young disciple with cordiality, and admitted him to
his confidence. Clay had been recently defending Burr before a
Kentucky court, entirely believing that his designs were lawful and
sanctioned. Mr. Jefferson showed him the cipher letters of that
mysterious and ill-starred adventurer, which convinced Mr. Clay that
Burr was certainly a liar, if he was not a traitor. Mr. Jefferson's
perplexity in 1806 was similar to that of Jackson in 1833,--too much
money in the treasury. The revenue then was fifteen millions; and,
after paying all the expenses of the government and the stipulated
portion of the national debt, there was an obstinate and most
embarrassing surplus. What to do with this irrepressible surplus was
the question then discussed in Mr. Jefferson's Cabinet. The President,
being a free-trader, would naturally have said, Reduce the duties. But
the younger men of the party, who had no pet theories, and
particularly our young Senator, who had just come in from a six weeks'
horseback flounder over bridgeless roads, urged another solution of
the difficulty,--Internal Improvements. But the President was a
strict-constructionist, denied the authority of Congress to vote money
for public works, and was fully committed to that opinion.

Mr. Jefferson yielded. The most beautiful theories will not always
endure the wear and tear of practice. The President, it is true, still
maintained that an amendment to the Constitution ought to precede
appropriations for public works; but he said this very briefly and
without emphasis, while he stated at some length, and with force, the
desirableness of expending the surplus revenue in improving the
country. As time wore on, less and less was said about the amendment,