Page:Life of Henry Clay (Schurz; v. 1).djvu/223

Rh an evident flutter in the House. It was darkly, shyly hinted at in several speeches as something “extraordinary,” something peculiarly calculated to involve the United States in dangerous complications with foreign powers. The consequence was that Clay, irritated, broke out with a speech full of fire but rather loose in argument. He predicted that a “tremendous storm was ready to burst upon our happy country,” meaning a design on the part of the “Holy Alliance” to subvert free institutions in America; he denounced as “low and debased” those who did not “dare” to express their sympathies with suffering Greece; and finally he defied them to go home, if they “dared,” to their constituents, to tell them that their representatives had “shrunk from the declaration of their own sentiments,” just as he had been “dared” when opposing the pension to Commodore Perry's mother.

Some members of the House resented such language, and a bitter altercation followed, especially undesirable in the case of a candidate for the presidency. Indeed, ambitious statesmen gifted with oratorical temperaments, whose perorations are apt to run away with their judgment, may study this debate with profit, to observe some things which it is well to avoid. Richard M. Johnson of Kentucky, at the time one of Clay's most ardent friends and backers for the presidency, dolefully remarked after this debate that “Clay was the most imprudent man in the world.”

The resolution on the Greek cause was never