Page:Henry Adams' History of the United States Vol. 4.djvu/389

1808. :"I see no other honorable course in which peace can be maintained. Take whatever other project has been hinted at and war inevitably results.  While we can procrastinate the miseries of war, I am for procrastinating.  We thereby gain the additional advantage of waiting the events in Europe. The true interests of this country can be found only in peace.  Among many other important considerations, remember that the moment you go to war you may bid adieu to every prospect of discharging the national debt."

The Secretary of the Treasury had only a month before officially asserted the contrary; but any excuse for avoiding war seemed to satisfy the House. From the beginning to the end of this long and ardent debate not one member from any quarter of the Union ventured to say—what every man in the United States would have said ten years later—that after the formal and fixed decisions of France and England war existed in fact and should be declared in form.

With all John Randolph's waywardness and extravagance, he alone shone among this mass of mediocrities, and like the water-snakes in Coleridge's silent ocean his every track was a flash of golden fire. At moments he struck passionately at his own favorite companions—at Macon and Williams—as he struck at Jefferson. The steady decline of public spirit stung his pride. "It was in that fatal session of 1805-1806 that the policy of yielding to anything