Mr. Clay’s remarks caused great interest to be felt in behalf of South American liberty, and during the summer following, the president appointed three commissioners, Messrs. Rodney, Graham, and Bland, to proceed to South America, and examine her political, civil and social condition as preliminary to rendering them any assistance. Mr. Clay regarded the appointment as impolitic, and when a bill came before the house in March 1818, providing for the support of government, objected to having it embrace a clause appropriating thirty thousand dollars for their compensation, for constitutional reasons. For it he proposed to substitute an amendment, appropriating eighteen thousand dollars as the outfit and one year’s salary of a minister from the United States to the Independent Provinces of the river La Plata in South America. He accompanied the presentation of the amendment with a speech of great power, evincing great geographical and historical knowledge, and setting forth clearly the condition of the people. The amendment, however, was not adopted. Many members of prominence differed with Mr. Clay, for whose opinions he expressed his respect, and regretted that his own convictions of expediency and duty led him to take a different view of the subject. He directly avowed that considerations of liberty and humanity had no little weight with him in advocating their cause, but at the same time his belief, that the adoption of the measure under consideration, while it would add to the renown of the republic, would render material assistance to those who were greatly in need of it. He vindicated himself from the charge which had been made, that he was desirous of fomenting a war between the states and Spain. He indulged in animating anticipations of the number and importance of the governments which might be formed in those vast, fertile, and beautiful provinces. To attempts at proving the movements of the colonists as rebellious, opposing the lawful government of Spain, he replied by clearly showing that if that power had possessed a legal claim to their allegiance, she had forfeited it by withholding that protection requisite to entitle her to it, and that consequently the people of Spanish America were contending for nothing more than their legal and natural rights. ‘But’ said Mr. Clay, ‘I take a broader, bolder position. I maintain that an oppressed people are authorized, whenever they can, to rise and break their fetters. This was the great principle of the English revolution. It was the great principle of our own. We must therefore pass sentence of condemnation upon the founders of our liberty, say that they were rebels and traitors, and that we are at this moment legislating without competent powers, before we can condemn the course of Spanish America.’ He contended that if we were justified in our attempts at independence, much more was she, who had writhed beneath the scourge of oppression so