ed, and also,
at the rate of $1500 per year, for the Piqua, Fort Wayne, and Chicago
service, as mentioned above.

These accounts have already been discussed some here; but when we are
amongst them, as when we are in the Patent Office, we must peep about a
good deal before we can see all the curiosities. I shall not be tedious
with them. As to the large item of $1500 per year--amounting in the
aggregate to $26,715 for office rent, clerk hire, fuel, etc., I barely
wish to remark that, so far as I can discover in the public documents,
there is no evidence, by word or inference, either from any disinterested
witness or of General Cass himself, that he ever rented or kept a separate
office, ever hired or kept a clerk, or even used any extra amount of fuel,
etc., in consequence of his Indian services. Indeed, General Cass's entire
silence in regard to these items, in his two long letters urging his
claims upon the government, is, to my mind, almost conclusive that no such
claims had any real existence.

But I have introduced General Cass's accounts here chiefly to show the
wonderful physical capacities of the man. They show that he not only did
the labor of several men at the same time, but that he often did it at
several places, many hundreds of miles apart, at the same time. And at
eating, too, his capacities are shown to be quite as wonderful. From
October, 1821, to May, 1822, he eat ten rations a day in Michigan, ten
rations a day here in Washington, and near five dollars' worth a day on
the road between the two places! And then there is an important discovery
in his example--the art of being paid for what one eats, instead of having
to pay for it. Hereafter if any nice young man should owe a bill which
he cannot pay in any other way, he can just board it out. Mr. Speaker, we
have all heard of the animal standing in doubt between two stacks of hay
and starving to death. The like of that would never happen to General
Cass. Place the stacks a thousand miles apart, he would stand stock-still
midway between them, and eat them both at once, and the green grass along
the line would be apt to suffer some, too, at the same time. By all means
make him President, gentlemen. He will feed you bounteously--if--if there
is any left after he shall have helped himself.

But, as General Taylor is, par excellence, the hero of the Mexican War,
and as you Democrats say we Whigs have always opposed the war, you think
it must be very awkward