vote.
I told him I should vote for the bill, because I believed
it to be right, but that it would lose me the support of every
newspaper in Massachusetts that had been friendly to me before.
I voted accordingly. The vote was met by a storm of indignation
from one end of Massachusetts to the other, in which every
Republican newspaper in the State, so far as I know, united.
The Springfield _Republican_ and the Boston _Herald,_ as will
well be believed, were in glory. The conduct of no pick-
pocket or bank robber could have been held up to public indignation
and contempt in severer language than the supporters of that
bill. A classmate of mine, an eminent man of letters, a gentleman
of great personal worth, addressed a young ladies' school,
or some similar body in Western Massachusetts, on the subject
of the decay of public virtue as exemplified by me. He declared
that I had separated myself from the best elements in the
State.

The measure was passed over the President's veto. But it
cost the Republican Party its majority in the House of Representatives.
A large number of the member of the House who had voted for
it lost their seats. If the question of my reelection had
come on within a few weeks thereafter, I doubt whether I should
have got forty votes in the whole Legislature. If I had flinched
or apologized, I should have been destroyed. But I stood
to my guns. I wrote a letter to the people of Massachusetts
in which I took up case by case each provision of the bill,
and showed how important it was for the interest of commerce
between the States, or with foreign countries, and how well
it justified the moderate expenditure. I pointed out that
the bill had been, in proportion to the resources of the Government,
less in amount than those John Quincy Adams and Daniel Webster
had formerly advocated; that Mr. Webster, with the single
exception of his service for preserving the Union, prided
himself on his support of this policy of public improvement
more than on anything else in his life, and had made more
speeches on that subject than on any other. Mr. Adams claimed
to be the author of the policy of internal improvements. So
that it was a Massachusetts policy, and a Massachusetts doctrine.
I asked the people of Massachusetts to consider whether they
could reasonably expect to get their living by manufacture,
to which nearly the whole State was devoted, bringing their
raw material and their fuel and their i