remonstrated.
"His interests are coincident with those of the South. His hope of the
presidency itself vests in his constituents, and the wand would be
broken in his hand were he to lend himself to partiality of any kind.
Mr. Clay is a great patriot, I believe, Jacksonite though I am--he knows
no South nor North, nor East nor West, but the Union alone, solid and
undivided."

"All this is true," she answered, "in one sense. It is thus he speaks,
and, like all partial parents, even thinks he feels toward his
offspring; but observe his acts narrowly from first to last. He has a
manufacturer's heart, with all his genius. He loves machinery--the sound
of the mill, the anvil, the spinning-jenny, the sight of the ship upon
the high-seas, or steamboat on the river, the roar of commerce, far more
than the work of the husbandman. We are an agricultural people, we of
the South and West--and especially we Southerners, with our poverty of
invention, our one staple, our otherwise helpless habits, incident to
the institution which, however it may be our curse, is still our wealth,
and to which, for the present time, we are bound, Ixion-like, by every
law of necessity. What does this tariff promise? Where will the profit
rest? Where will the loss fall crushingly? The slow torture of which we
read in histories of early times was like to this. Each day a weight was
added to that already lying on the breast of a strong man, bound on his
back by the cords of his oppressors, until relief and destruction came
together, and the man was crushed; such was the _peine forte et dure_."

"Calhoun is patriarchal,[5] and is now placing all his individual
strength to the task of heaving off this incubus from the breast of our
body politic, but with small avail, for he has no lever to assist
him--no fulcrum whereon to rest it; otherwise he might say with
Archimedes, 'With these I could move a world.' He is unaided, this
eagled-eyed prophet of ours, looking sorrowfully, sagaciously down into
the ages! South Carolina is the Joseph, that his cruel brothers, the
remaining Southern States, have sold to the Egyptians, as a bond-slave.
But they shall yet come to drink of his cup, and eat of his bread of
opinion, in the famine of their Canaan. Nullification shall leave a
fitting successor, as Philip of Macedon left Alexander to carry out his
plans. The abolitionist and the slave-holder are as distinct as were
Charles I. and Cromwell, or Catharine de Medicis