what is perhaps the most stinging of all his
satires, turned Taylor's platform or absence of platform to ridicule in
lines known to thousands of Englishmen who know nothing of their
occasion:--

"Ez fer my princerples, I glory
In hevin' nothin' of the sort.
I ain't a Whig, I ain't a Tory,
I'm jest a--Candidate in short."

"Monterey," however, proved an even more successful election cry than
"Tippercanoe." The Democrats tried to play the same game by putting
forward General Cass, who had also fought with some distinction in the
Mexican War and had the advantage--if it were an advantage--of having
really proved himself a stirring Democratic partisan as well. But Taylor
was the popular favourite, and the Whigs by the aid of his name carried
the election.

He turned out no bad choice. For the brief period during which he held
the Presidential office he showed considerable firmness and a sound
sense of justice, and seems to have been sincerely determined to hold
himself strictly impartial as between the two sections into which the
Union was becoming every day more sharply divided. Those who expected,
on the strength of his blunt avowal of slave-owning, that he would show
himself eager to protect and extend Slavery were quite at fault. He
declared with the common sense of a soldier that California must come
into the Union, as she wished to come in, as a Free State, and that it
would be absurd as well as monstrous to try and compel her citizens to
be slave-owners against their will. But he does not appear to have had
any comprehensive plan of pacification to offer for the quieting of the
distracted Union, and, before he could fully develop his policy,
whatever it may have been, he died and bequeathed his power to Millard
Filmore, the Vice-President, a typical "good party man" without
originality or initiative.

The sectional debate had by this time become far more heated and
dangerous than had been the debates which the Missouri Compromise had
settled thirty years before. The author of the Missouri Compromise still
lived, and, as the peril of the Union became desperate, it came to be
said more and more, even by political opponents, that he and he alone
could save the Republic. Henry Clay, since his defeat in 1844, had
practically retired from the active practice of politics. He was an old
man. His fine physique had begun to give way, as is often the case with
such men, under the strain of a long life