time, who was "without fear and without reproach."

The Democratic Bayards were antagonized in Jackson's time by the
Whig Claytons, the other Delaware chair in the United States Senate
having been occupied since 1829 by John Middleton Clayton. He was
an accomplished lawyer, and one of the leaders of the Whig party.
Under his direction Delaware was a Whig State, and had it been a
larger one, Mr. Clayton would doubtless have been nominated to the
Vice-Presidency, if not to the Presidency. He was zealously devoted
to his party, and when, later in life, a delegation waited on him
to question some of his acts as not in accordance with Whig
principles, he rose, and drawing himself up to his full height,
exclaimed: "What! unwhig me? Me, who was a Whig when you gentlemen
were riding cornstalk horses in your fathers' barnyards?" The
delegation asked his pardon for having doubted his party loyalty,
and at once withdrew.

James Alfred Pearce, of Maryland, entered the House of Representatives
during the Jackson Administration, and was successively re-elected
(with the exception of a single term) until he was transferred to
the Senate in 1843, and served in that body until his death in
1862. He was another "wheel horse" of the Whig party, although he
shrank from political controversy. His home friends, who were very
proud of his reputation, brought him forward at one time as a
candidate for the Presidency. But he refused to permit his name
to be used, on the ground that the burdens of the White House were
too costly a price to pay for its honors.

Mr. Pearce was a devoted friend of the Congressional Library, and
during his long service on the Committee having it in charge he
selected the books purchased. In doing this he excluded all works
calculated in his opinion to engender sectional differences, and
when the _Atlantic Monthly_ was established he refused to order it
for the Library. He was the founder of the Botanic Garden, and
the Coast Survey was another object of his especial attention and
favor.

Mr. Pearce's care in the choice of books was my no means a notion
of his own. From the founding of the Library it was the policy of
many of its warmest friends to exclude every publication which
would engender and foster sectional differences. They went on the
principle of concealing difficulties, rather than of facing them
squarely. Very different is the broader policy now maintained in
this great library, on who