Page:Webster and Hayne's Celebrated Speeches.djvu/66

62 had proved a legal settlement in South Carolina, and was not to be removed. The “accursed policy” of the tariff, also, had established the fact of its birth and parentage in the same state. No wonder, therefore, the gentleman wished to carry the war, as he expressed it, into the enemy’s country. Prudently willing to quit these subjects, he was doubtless desirous of fastening others, which could not be transferred south of Mason and Dixon’s line. The politics of New England became his theme; and it was in this part of his speech, I think, that he menaced me with such sore discomfiture.

Discomfiture! why, sir, when he attacks any thing which I maintain, and overthrows it; when he turns the right or left of any position which I take up; when he drives me from any ground I choose to occupy, he may then talk of discomfiture, but not till that distant day. What has he done? Has he maintained his own charges? Has he proved what he alleged? Has he sustained himself in his attack on the government, and on the history of the north, in the matter of the public lands? Has he disproved a fact, refuted a proposition, weakened an argument maintained by me? Has he come within beat of drum of any position of mine? O, no; but he has “carried the war into the enemy’s country”! Carried the war into the enemy’s country! Yes, sir, and what sort of a war has he made of it? Why, sir, he has stretched a dragnet over the whole surface of perished pamphlets, indiscreet sermons, frothy paragraphs, and fuming popular addresses; over whatever the pulpit in its moments of alarm, the press in its heats, and parties in their extravagance, have severally thrown off, in times of general excitement and violence. He has thus swept together a mass of such things, as, but that they are now old, the public health would have required him rather to leave in their state of dispersion.

For a good long hour or two, we had the unbroken pleasure of listening to the honorable member, while he recited, with his usual grace and spirit, and with evident high gusto, speeches, pamphlets, addresses, and all the et ceteras of the political press, such as warm heads produce in warm times, and such as it would be “discomfiture” indeed for any one, whose taste did not delight in that sort of reading, to be obliged to peruse. This is his war. This is to carry the war into the enemy’s country. It is in an invasion of this sort that he flatters himself with the expectation of gaining laurels fit to adorn a senator’s brow.

Mr. President, I shall not, it will, I trust, not be expected that I should, either now or at any time, separate this farrago into parts, and answer and examine its components. I shall hardly bestow upon it all a general remark or two. In the run of forty years, sir, under this constitution, we have experienced sundry successive violent party contests. Party arose, indeed, with the constitution itself, and in some form or other has attended through the greater part of its history.

Whether any other constitution than the old articles of confederation was desirable was, itself, a question on which parties formed; if a new constitution was framed, what powers should be given to it was another question; and when it had been formed, what was, in fact, the just extent of the powers actually conferred, was a third. Parties, as we know, existed under the first administration, as distinctly marked as those which manifested themselves at any subsequent period.

The contest immediately preceding the political change in 1801, and that, again, which existed at the commencement of the late war, are other