iration and applause. The effect of the speech may be
seen in the fact that the obnoxious section, though upheld by the
eloquent and patriotic patron of the bill, by the gallant Hayne and by
others, was stricken out by the decisive vote of 37 to 10. Had it
remained in the bill, in less than ninety days it might have produced a
war with Spain.[9]

On the election of Mr. John Quincy Adams to the Presidency, and
especially after the delivery of his first message to Congress, he
became hostile to his administration, and opposed its prominent
measures. His most remarkable performance was his speech on the
exclusive constitutional competency of the executive to originate
foreign missions without the advice and consent of the Senate. As a
constitutional thesis, without respect to the time of delivery,--for,
although Mr. Adams asserted the power, he at the same moment waived its
exercise,--as a specimen of his manner of treating a great
constitutional question when numerous authorities and precedents are to
be examined and set aside, this speech deserves to be studied. With the
exception of Gen. Marshall's speech in the case of Jonathan Robbins, it
stands preeminent in our political literature as a model of profound
research, of thorough argumentation, and of overwhelming strength. The
reader at this day feels that he is borne along by a force which is not
only equal to the occasion, but above it, and which it is vain to
resist. The speech is no mean system of logic and of the rules of
evidence in itself. And in connection with this speech I may mention the
speech on the same subject, which he delivered some years later, in
reply to Mr. Livingston, and in which the topic is discussed with new
illustrations. These two speeches alone survive in any fulness of all
his forensic exertions. The speech which Mr. Tazewell himself thought
the best he ever delivered in the Senate, was on some one of the
bankrupt bills of his term of service; but of this speech not a passage
can now be found.

Nor would it be practicable to present here even a condensed view of the
reports which he drew either as the head or as a member of the Committee
of Foreign Affairs. Almost any one of those reports would have built up
a respectable reputation for its author. I shall only specify his report
on the Panama mission, which mainly settled the public mind in relation
to that measure; and his report on the Colonization Society, in which,
incidentally--and