‘Standing securely upon our conscious rectitude, and bearing aloft the shield of the constitution of our country, your puny efforts are impotent, and we defy all your power. Put the majority of 1834 in one scale, and that by which this expunging resolution is to be carried in the other, and let truth and justice in heaven above and on earth below, and liberty and patriotism, decide the preponderance. ‘What patriotic purpose is to be accomplished by this expunging resolution? Is it to appease the wrath, and heal the wounded pride, of the chief magistrate? If he be really the hero that his friends represent him, he must despise all mean condescension, all grovelling sycophancy, all self-degradation and self-abasement. He would reject with scorn and contempt, as unworthy of his fame, your _black scratches_ and _your baby lines_, in the fair records of his country.’ The expunging resolution, however, passed, and thus the just resolution of Mr. Clay was stricken from the national records, but not from the _record of memory_; there will it live until her functions cease, the memento of a patriotic purpose to place the signet of a nation’s displeasure upon as unprincipled an act as any ruler of that nation ever perpetrated. In the autumn of 1836, the presidential election took place, which resulted in elevating Mr. Van Buren to the chair of the chief magistracy, by one hundred and seventy of the two hundred and ninety-four electoral votes. At the time he entered upon the discharge of his official duties, the situation of the country was deplorable in the extreme. She was reaping the bitter fruits, which Mr. Clay had again and again predicted general Jackson would bring back from his experimental crusade and thrust down her throat. From Maine to Florida, her population were eating them, and gnashing their teeth with rage, when they contrasted their present lamentable condition, with what it was during the halcyon and equitable administration of Mr. Adams. Then, there was every thing to admire, and nothing to deprecate; now, there was nothing to admire and every thing to deprecate; then, the most devoted patriot, as he cast his eyes over his country, discovered abundant evidence of health, and the existence of few evils, and those medicable, or, if not, easily patible; now, wounds and bruises and putrescence, disfiguring it, he beheld at every stage of his survey, and ills of untold magnitude and enormity, for which no remedy could be devised. But there is no necessity for specification; it is sufficient to say, that when general Jackson took up the reins of government, he found the country prosperous and happy, and that when he laid them down, its _condition was just the reverse_. For every good which he found, its opposite evil had been substituted; for solvency, insolvency; for confidence, suspicion; for credit, discredit; for a sound and safe currency, one, if possible, worse than unsound and unsafe;