Page:Life of Henry Clay (Schurz; v. 2).djvu/42

32 set forth in it was based upon a fiction. “We are,” he began, “in the midst of a revolution, hitherto bloodless, but rapidly tending toward a total change of the pure republican character of the government, and the concentration of all power in the hands of one man.” This he sought to prove by showing that President Jackson had assumed power over the Treasury which the Constitution had withheld from the Executive and expressly conferred upon Congress.

During the revolutionary period, and among the men who had grown up under the influence of its reminiscences, the great danger threatening free institutions in America was thought to be that the Republic would be turned into a monarchy by a change in the character of the Executive. The spectre of a “king” haunted their imaginations in a variety of shapes. In Jefferson's mind, it was a sort of British king of Hamiltonian pattern. Clay's king was a successful military chieftain like Jackson; and Benton's a “money king,” with a monster bank at his command. In the writings and speeches of that time we constantly meet dismal predictions that, if this or that were done or permitted, the king would surely come. In the legislation of the first Congress under the Constitution, organizing the government, there were also traces of an anxious desire to withdraw all financial concerns as much as possible from the influence of the Executive, — sprung, perhaps, from the memories, familiar to all Americans, of the strug-