of participated distinction? I say again, that the upholding of State rights, on the one hand, and of the just powers of Congress, on the other, is indispensable to the preservation of our free republican government.

And now, Gentlemen, permit me to address to you a few words in regard to those measures of the general government which have caused the existing excitement throughout the country. I will pass rapidly over them. I need not argue to you Democrats the question of the sub-treasury, and I suppose it is hardly necessary to speak to you of Mr. Poinsett's militia bill. Into which of your mountains has not its discussion penetrated? Up which of all your winding streams has not its echo floated? I am sure he must be very tired of it himself. Remember always that the great principle of the Constitution on that subject is, that the militia is the militia of the States, and not of the general government; and being thus the militia of the States, there is no part of the Constitution worded with greater care, and with a more scrupulous jealousy, than that which grants and limits the power of Congress over it. Does it say that Congress may make use of the militia as it pleases? that it may call them out for drill and discipline under its own pay? No such thing. The terms used are the most precise and particular:-"Congress may provide for calling out the militia to execute the laws, to suppress insurrection, and to repel invasion." These three cases are specified, and these are all. Call out the militia to drill them! to discipline them! March the militia of Virginia to Wheeling to be drilled! Why, such a thing never entered into the head of any man, never, never. What is not very usual in the Constitution, after this specific enumeration of powers, it adds a negative in those golden words reserving to the States the appointment of officers and the training of the militia. That's it. Read this clause, and then read in Mr. Poinsett's project that the militia are to be trained by the President! Look on this picture, and on that. I do Virginia no more than justice when I say, that she first laid hold upon this monstrous project, and has continued to denounce it, and will never consent to it, by whatever weight of authority it may be urged on the country.

As to the sub-treasury, the subject is worn out. The topic is almost as empty of new ideas as the treasury itself is of money.

I had, the other day, the honor to address an assemblage of the merchants of New York. I asked them, among other things, whether this eternal cry about a separation of bank and state was not all mockery and humbug; and thousands of merchants, intimately acquainted with the whole subject, cried, "Yes, yes; it is!" The fact unquestionably is, that the funds of the government are just as much in the custody of the banks at this moment as they ever were; yet at the same time I believe that, under the law, there does exist, whenever the revenues of the country shall be uncommonly large, a power to stop at pleasure all the solvent banks in the community. Such is the opinion uniformly held by the best-informed men in the commercial parts of the country.

There is another expedient to augment executive power, quite novel in its character. I refer to the power conferred upon the President to select from among the appropriations of Congress such as he may consider entitled to preference, if the treasury is unable to meet them all, and to give or withhold the public money accordingly. This is certainly a marvellously democratic doctrine. Do you not remember the emphasis with which Mr. Jefferson expressed himself on the subject of specific appropriations? The law, as it now stands, requires them to be specific. If Congress, for instance, appropriate so many dollars for the building of ships, no part of the money may be applied to the pay of sailors or marines. This is the common rule. But how has this subject been treated in regard to those objects over which this Presidential discretion extends? The appropriations are specific still; but then a specific power is given to the President to dispense with the restriction; and thus one specific is set against the other. Let this process be carried but one step farther, and, although there may be a variety of appropriations made by Congress, yet, inasmuch as we have entire trust and confidence in the executive discretion, that the President will make the proper selections from among them, therefore we may enact, or say it shall be enacted, that what little money there may at any time be found in the treasury, the President may expend very much according to his own pleasure.

There is one other topic I must not omit. I am now endeavoring to prove, that, of all men on the face of the earth, you of Virginia, the descendants and disciples of some of the greatest

men of the Revolution, are most called to repudiate and to condemn the doctrines of this administration. I call upon you to apply to this administration all that body of political truth which you have learned from Henry, from Jefferson, from Madison, from Wythe, and that whole constellation of Revolutionary worthies, of whom you are justly proud, and under this light to examine and to say whether this exclusively Democratic administration are the favorers of civil liberty and of State rights, or the reverse. In furtherance of this design, I call your attention to the conduct of the President, of the executive departments, and of the Senate of the United States, in regard to the right and practice of the States to contract debts for their own purposes. Has it occurred to you what a deadly blow they have struck at the just authority and rights of the States? Let us follow this matter out a little. In the palmy times of the treasury, when it was not only full, but overflowing with the public money, the States, to a very considerable extent, engaged in works of internal improvement, and, in consequence of doing so, had occasion to borrow money. We all know that money can be had on much cheaper terms on the other continent than on this; hence the bonds of the States went abroad, and absorbed capital in Europe; and so long as their credit was unassailed and remained sound, this was accomplished, for the most part, at very reasonable rates. During this process, and while a number of the States had thus their State securities in the foreign market, the President of the United States, in his opening message to Congress at the commencement of the last session, comes out with a series of the most discouraging and most disparaging remarks on the credit of all the States. He tells Congress that the States will repent what they have done, and that they will find it difficult to pay the debts they have contracted; and this official language of the chief magistrate to the legislature goes out into the very market where these State bonds are held for sale. Then comes his Secretary, Mr. Woodbury, with a report in the same strain, giving it as his opinion, that the States have gone too far in this assumption of liabilities. But the thing does not stop here. Mr. Benton brings forward a resolution in the Senate declaring that the general government ought not to assume these debts of the States; that resolution is sent to a committee, and that committee make a report upon the

subject as long as yonder bridge, (though, I believe, by no means as often gone over,) the whole object and tendency of which are to disparage the credit of the States; and then Mr. Grundy makes a speech upon it to the same effect. What had Mr. Benton or Mr. Grundy to do with the matter? Were they called on to guarantee the debts of Virginia or of Maryland? Yet the effect very naturally and inevitably was, to depress the value of State securities in the foreign market. I was in Europe last summer. Massachusetts had her bonds in that market; and what did I see? The most miserable, pitiful, execrable lucubrations taken from the administration press in New York, endeavoring to prove that the States had not sovereignty enough to contract debts. These wretched productions declared that the bonds issued by the States of this Union were all void; that they were no better than waste paper; and exhorted European capitalists not to touch one of them. These articles, coming, as they did, from this side the water, were all seized on with avidity, and put into circulation in the leading journals of Europe. At the same time, the administration press in this country, unrebuked by the government, put forth arguments going to show that Virginia has no authority to contract a debt in the name and on the credit of the Commonwealth; that Massachusetts is so completely shorn of every particle of sovereignty whatever, that she can issue no public security of any kind on which to borrow money! And this is the doctrine of State rights! Well, Gentlemen, I was called on to meet this question, and I told those who put to me the inquiry, that the States of the American Union were, in this respect, just as sovereign as any of their states in Europe. I held a correspondence on the subject, which was published at length; and for that, yes, for defending State rights before the face of all Europe, I have been denounced as one who wants the general government to assume the debts of the States, as one who has conspired to buy up British Whigs (as they call us) with foreign gold! All this, however, has not ruffled my temper. I have seen it all with composure.

But I confess there is one thing which has disturbed the serenity of my mind. It is what appears to be a studied attempt, on the part of this whole administration, including its head, to fix a spot upon the good name of the early founders of our Constitution. Read the letter of the President to some of his

friends in Kentucky, to what he calls "the entire Democracy of Kentucky." (I should like much to know what constitutes the Democracy of a State.) These good friends of the President write to him that the entire Democracy of the State is with him, and he writes back how happy he is to hear that such is the fact. The State comes to the vote, and two thirds of the people of the State are found to be against him; yet still he clasps to his breast, with exultation, the "entire Democracy of Kentucky!” And so it will be a month hence. General Harrison will have been elected by a simultaneous rush of the free voters of the whole Union; yet Mr. Van Buren will still insist that he has in his favor "the entire Democracy" of the country. Be this as it may, he does, in that letter, ascribe to President Washington, in 1791, and to Mr. Madison, in 1816, corrupt motives for their public conduct. I may forgive this, but I shall not forget it. I ask you to read that letter, and one other written on a similar occasion; and then, if it comes in your way, I ask you to peruse an address put forth by the administration members of the New York Legislature, What do you think they say? You, countrymen of Jefferson and of Madison, of Henry, of Wythe, of the Lees, and a host of kindred spirits of the same order,-you, who inherit the soil and the principles of those men who shed their blood for our national independence, what do you think they say of your fathers and of my fathers? Why, that, in all their efforts and sacrifices in that great struggle, they meant, not independence, not civil liberty, not the establishment of a republican government, but merely to transfer the throne from England to America, and to be themselves peers and nobles around it! Does it not disturb the blood of Virginians to hear language like this? I do say that this attempt to scorch the fair, unsullied reputation of our ancestors— But no, no, they

cannot scorch it; it will go through a hotter furnace than any their detraction can kindle, and even the smell of fire shall not be upon their garments. Yet it does raise one's indignation to see men, certainly not the greatest of all benefactors of their country, thus attempt to blight the fame of men both then and ever since universally admitted to have been among her greatest and her best of friends.

While speaking of the attacks of this administration on State rights, I should not do my duty if I omitted to notice the outrage recently perpetrated on the most sacred rights of the State