for honesty, dishonesty; for purity, corruption; for justice, injustice; for frankness and candor, intrigue and duplicity; for order, disorder; for quiet, turmoil; for fidelity, infidelity; for enterprise, indolence; for wealth, poverty; for patient industry, wild speculation; for republican simplicity, haughty aristocracy; for wisdom, folly; for health, disease; for happiness, misery; for hope, despair; and for life, death. This substitution, Mr. Clay clearly foresaw would be made; he predicted it, and forewarned the country of it. Such was the condition of the country, when Mr. Van Buren attempted to ‘walk in the footsteps of his illustrious predecessor.’ Soon after his inauguration, he issued his proclamation, ordering an extra session of congress, to commence the first Monday in September. Pursuant to this, congress met to prescribe some mode of relief. In his message, the president recommended the _sub-treasury system_ for the deposit, transfer, and disbursement of the public revenue. This was the engrossing topic of the session, and which Mr. Clay combated and denounced unsparingly. He detected in it, and lucidly exposed, _that_ which was calculated, not only to perpetuate the excesses and abuses under which the land was then groaning, but to superinduce fresh ones. He saw in it the grand link of that chain, destined to bind the resources and patronage of the government to the _car of party_, which for eight long years Mr. Van Buren’s predecessor had been so busily engaged in forging. Mr. Clay’s speech on this occasion is an inimitable specimen of close argumentative reasoning. After exposing the defects, absurdities, and danger of the sub-treasury scheme, he declared his decided conviction, that the only practicable measure for restoring a sound, safe, and uniform currency to the United States, was a properly organized United States bank, but that it would be unwise to propose such an institution, until the conviction of its necessity should become permanently impressed upon the minds of the people. The sub-treasury bill passed the senate by a vote of twenty-five to twenty, but in the house was laid on the table by a vote of one hundred and twenty to one hundred and seven. Petitions for the erection of a national bank poured into congress incessantly, quite too fast to please the administration, which began to tremble for the safety of its darling projects. Mr. Wright, from the committee on finance, moved that the prayer of the memorialists ought not to be granted. Mr. Clay said, if the honorable senator persisted in his opposition, he should feel constrained to move to strike out all after _resolved_, and substitute ‘that it will be expedient to establish a bank of the United States, whenever it shall be manifest, that a clear majority of the people of the United States desire such an institution.’