hments of the legislative department; and, secondly, to preserve
the people from hasty, dangerous or criminal legislation on the part of
their representatives. This is the design and intention of the veto
power; and the fear expressed by General Hamilton was, that Presidents,
so far from exercising it too often, would not exercise it as often as
the safety of the people required; that they might lack the moral
courage to stake themselves in opposition to a favorite measure of the
majority of the two Houses of Congress; and thus deprive the people, in
many instances, of their right to pass upon a bill before it becomes a
final law. The cases in which President Jackson has exercised the veto
power have shown the soundness of these observations. No ordinary
President would have staked himself against the Bank of the United
States and the two Houses of Congress in 1832. It required President
Jackson to confront that power--to stem that torrent--to stay the
progress of that charter, and to refer it to the people for their
decision. His moral courage was equal to the crisis. He arrested the
charter until it could be got to the people, and they have arrested it
forever. Had he not done so, the charter would have become law, and
its repeal almost impossible. The people of the whole Union would now
have been in the condition of the people of Pennsylvania, bestrode by
the monster, in daily conflict with him, and maintaining a doubtful
contest for supremacy between the government of a State and the
directory of a moneyed corporation....

Sir, I think it right, in approaching the termination of this great
question, to present this faint and rapid sketch of the brilliant,
beneficent, and glorious administration of President Jackson. It is
not for me to attempt to do it justice; it is not for ordinary men to
attempt its history. His military life, resplendent with dazzling
events, will demand the pen of a nervous writer; his civil
administration, replete with scenes which have called into action so
many and such various passions of the human heart, and which has given
to native sagacity so many victories over practiced politicians, will
require the profound, luminous, and philosophical conceptions of a
Livy, a Plutarch, or a Sallust. This history is not to be written in
our day. The contemporaries of such events are not the hands to
describe them. Time must first do its office--must silence the
passions, remove the actor