commemorating the triumph of your ancient foes, and the overthrow of the friends whose beloved and honored chief you had so long been.

But the cloud has passed away, and it has been permitted to your eye as to ours, to be made glad again by the return of the sunlight which for a time it so darkly veiled. All that you labored, all that you endured, all that you dared, in your arduous struggle with the great money power of the country, centralized in the Bank of the United States, and individualized in the person of its President, was not in vain -as at one moment it might perhaps have seemed. That confidence in the people, in whose behalf all was labored, and endured, and dared, which was your chief encouragement and support through the whole, was not all a fond folly. The curse of another mammoth National Bank was not destined to be again fastened on the country; and the prompt recovery of the popular mind, and its overwhelming reaction from the delusions which marked its brief political insanity of the year 1840, constitute but another evidence of the justice of our reliance upon the ultimate rectitude of its calm and sober judgment.

You have now lived, my dear old General, to behold that which was the great question of your political career, settled beyond any remaining shadow of doubt or danger. Your success is as lasting in its ultimate, as it was complete in its immediate, effect; and a National Bank can now never again be rechartered under the present Constitution of this Union. If the Whigs succeeded in the fall of '40, it was only by means which involved the elements of their own necessary and swift destruction as a Party; and which afford the most decisive evidence of the final settlement, and the right settlement, of this long vexed question. The anti-Bank professions of their Presidential ticket alone secured its success. Consistency with those professions has imposed on Mr. Tyler a moral necessity to pursue the course which we witnessed from him with so much satisfaction at the Extra Session, on this question. And the subsequent result of all the popular elections has now been such as to silence perforce all further cavil or controversy as to the deliberate and determined will of the people in relation to a National Bank.

For this, brave and good old man, we are all indebted to you, more than to any other single individual, living or dead. You have done your work-you have fulfilled your mission-enough for one man to have done and fulfilled. You may now lay down your gray hairs, to that repose of which I know that you have no dread, tranquil and triumphant. The couch of that last repose will be surrounded with the blessings and bedewed with the tears VOL. X., No. XLIII.-11

of a nation. The animosities which grew out of the vast pecuniary interests mingling themselves with the stormy political passions of the times, and which centred upon you with a violence and bitterness unknown since the epoch when Jefferson was the object of the same are now fast subsiding. Many of your most vehement opponents of a few years back, are now compelled to recognise the sagacity, not less than the bold patriotism, of the ground so early taken by you, and so firmly maintained, against the recharter of the late Bank of the United States. You saw from the beginning, what time has too amply developed and proved, the inner moral rottenness, to which the outward fair seeming of that fatal institution was but the whiting of the sepulchre. Independently of the question of its constitutionality, you appreciated rightly the tremendous political as well as pecuniary power it was able to wield-its corrupting tendency, both upon those on whom its influence was brought to bear, and upon those wielding the control of its own administration-the decided proclivity, already indicated by many significant symptoms, toward that abyss of bankruptcy and disgrace in which it is now sunk-and the danger to the liberties, as well as to the true prosperity of the country, of allowing it again to strike deeper its Upas roots into our soil, by a national recharter. You saw and understood it thus, and nobly performed the great duty which such a crisis brought on you; and many a former opponent who then deemed you fool or madman or worse, has now been taught by time and truth to look from the same point of view, to see and understand it in the same light, and to change into thanks and praise the execrations with which he was once wont to load your name. And the number of those is fast increasing; the friends of a National Bank, of any kind, rapidly dwindling; and the day is not distant which shall witness this question as no longer a subject of party division,—and when that which is now but the voice of a majority, though a large and overwhelming majority, will become an unanimity of admiration and applause to you, as the Hercules who freed his country from a worse than Lernæan or Nemean monster.

I am very far from being an undiscriminating eulogist of your whole administration. It was not free from faults, of a grave character, which, like everything proceeding from your strong and heavy hand, have left no slight traces behind them on the direction and character of our politics. Your not infrequent bad appointments to office, into which you were misled by your personal attachments, and by the generous impulses of your own noble and trusting heart, have done a great deal of mischief, immediately or remotely. And, far worse, the extent to which you al

lowed similar motives to impel you, in the pernicious practice of "political proscription," was a deep and serious evil. This charge has been no doubt greatly exaggerated; and no small palliation for it may be drawn from the extent to which the same practice was pursued by our opponents, wherever a local ascendency gave them the power. The fact remains, however, undeniable, that you did carry it to a greater length than had ever before been attempted by any administration,-and that it was calculated deeply to vitiate the purity of our politics, by increasing the already too powerful action of Executive influence; by affording a plea of retaliation to the opposite party; and by encouraging the introduction into the political struggle, on both sides, of interested motives of action, degrading in their nature at the same time that they embittered and inflamed.

I say nothing of another leading feature of your administration, which, though perhaps a subject of some regret, I do not presume to make one of censure. I allude to the high and strong working of the machinery of the Executive office in your hands. This was forced on you by circumstances which you could not otherwise meet and conquer. Your position, throughout all that period when you were denounced yourself as a violent assailant upon other departments of the government, and as an ambitious usurper of their rights and powers, was eminently conservative and defensive. For the maintenance of the high ground you had assumed, as the determined opponent of the recharter of the Bank, you were compelled by the pressure of attack upon you, by that powerful institution as well as by a great political party, to put forth to their utmost scope all the energies of the Executive arm. You did so, undoubtedly, with a free and bold hand; though the most violent clamor of opposition in vain attempted to fasten on you a charge of overstepping but a hair's-breadth the limits of constitution or law, in any one of your strongest acts of the character here referred to. It was a great crisis, and it brought with it great necessities and great duties. It cannot be denied that it is

entirely hostile to the genius of American institutions that an Executive Chief Magistrate should assume an attitude antagonistical to the legislative departments of the government - turning round, within a short time after their refusal to pursue a certain course recommended by him to them, and doing the act in question by virtue of his own independent authority. I refer particularly to the celebrated order for the Removal of the Deposites. Yet peculiar circumstances may justify it,-and indeed in the actual case in question that very act was the noblest and best of your life. You acted on profound convictions and under a heavy respon

sibility. You knew the Congress to be unfaithful to their duty, to that great constituency toward which you occupied, equally with them, the representative relation. You knew that no small number of the members of that body occupied even a position of pecuniary dependance on the favor of the Bank, fatal to that freedom necessary to give a full moral weight to their acts or opinions. And, foreseeing the course the Bank was preparing to pursue, to inflict on the country a pressure of distress proportionate to its gigantic means of mischief-in so far curtailing the latter by transferring the public deposites to other banks, that they might be made the instrument to mitigate rather than to aggravate that distress, you acted perfectly right. Yet such acts are certainly of doubtful safety and dangerous precedent. They are only to be hazarded on great occasions, for great motives, and by great men. You were indeed fully justified in it, both by the approval of your country, and by the evidence which time has since developed of the wisdom of that general policy which this act was an indispensable means of carrying into effect. Yet still I cannot but regret the necessity for straining so far as you did, throughout the course of your administration, the power and influence of your department of the government. For if the proper balance between it and the rest was not seriously deranged, it was certainly somewhat shaken. And though, under the mild. and moderate administration of your successor, it may be said to have recovered its just poise, yet, sincere as are my attachment and gratitude to you, I have no desire ever again to witness a period, in the working of our complex system of government, in which the Executive office, wielded by another hand, shall absorb a degree of political power and influence so disproportionate to that of the other branches, and to the intention of the original framers of the system.

In connexion with this point, however, there is one important idea which ought not to be lost sight of; namely, that although, relatively to the other departments of the government, you may have been compelled thus to ply the energies of your own to a point verging on a dangerous extreme, yet the general direction of the policy you thus labored to carry out tended really to diminish and weaken the action of the whole federal government-the Executive, of course, inclusive. That policy was a self-denying one, being in direct antagonism to the consolidating policy of the party by which you were kept under an incessant pressure of attack. You were constantly refusing to allow the federal government to assume powers which your opponents insisted on forcing upon it. Your action was negative-it was theirs which was positive.

The word which expressed your position, and which was used to represent you, was "VETO," I forbid! You denied to the federal government the Internal Improvement power, and "forbade" it— though the execution of the laws which you thus arrested would have conferred on your office an amount of power, influence, and patronage, growing out of the disbursement of such vast sums of money over the whole extent of the Union, greater perhaps than contained in the whole aggregate of its ordinary and legitimate functions. So, too, you denied to the federal government the power of placing itself in alliance with the great money power of the country, as embodied in a national bank, the head, centre, and controlling power, of the whole credit and paper-money system. You denied its constitutional competency, as well as the good policy of rechartering such an institution-though there can be no doubt that such an alliance would give to any administration a hold upon power which the strongest opposition that could be brought against it might perhaps vainly essay to shake.

It is true that in the substitute you adopted, as the only alternative then practicable, you committed a mistake which proved a very fatal one in more respects than one. Bad as was the fiscal system of a great bank chartered by and dependant on the federal government, the State Bank Deposite system, of which you made an experiment as a choice of evils, was not much better. Yet so far as regards the question of federal power, this course was a denegation of power; and I know well that you had no anticipation of that weight of influence, centering in the Treasury Department, which was found to grow out of the control of the vast surplus revenue then accumulating, distributed on deposite among a large number of State banks, and which in bad hands might have proved a very mischievous and dangerous power. And we all know that at best you never looked upon that system with any very cordial liking. Its adoption was avowedly experimental, as an alternative which seemed at the time a necessity, as the temporary expedient of an emergency, as a refuge from a greater evil. You adopted it not as a "system," but on the ground expressly stated in the celebrated Cabinet paper of Sept. 18th, 1833, that the question of the recharter of the Bank had now been set at rest by your reëlection and the popular confirmation of your Veto-that there appeared no reason to anticipate the establishment of any substitute by Congress-and that, "being bound to regulate his course by the laws as they exist, and not to anticipate the interference of the legislative power, for the purpose of framing new systems, it was proper for the President seasonably to consider the means by which the services rendered