This advice had been given with a view to influence the appointment of a mixed political Cabinet, but while Monroe professed to believe that a free government could exist without political parties, he nevertheless sought to bring all of the people into one political fold, and that the Democratic. Yet he certainly and plainly sought to allay factions in his own party, and with this view selected Crawford for the Treasury—the gentleman who had been so warmly supported in the nominating struggle by the Clintonians and by all who objected to the predominating influence of Virginia in national politics. Monroe, like his immediate predecessor, accepted and acted upon the doctrines of the new school of Republicans as represented by Clay and Calhoun, both of whom still favored a tariff, while Clay had become a warm advocate of a national system of internal improvements. These two statesmen thus early differed on some questions, but they were justly regarded as the leading friends and advisers of the administration, for to both still clung the patriotic recollections of the war which they had so warmly advocated and supported, and the issue of which attested their wisdom. Clay preferred to be called a Republican; Calhoun preferred to be called a Democrat, and just then the terms were so often exchanged and mingled that history is at fault in the exact designation, while tradition is colored by the bias of subsequent events and lives. Monroe’s first inaugural leaned toward Clay’s scheme of internal improvements, but questioned its constitutionality. Clay was next to Jefferson the most original of all our statesmen and politicians. He was prolific in measures, and almost resistless in their advocacy. From a political standpoint he was the most direct author of the war of 1812, for his advocacy mainly brought it to the issue of arms, which through him and Calhoun were substituted for diplomacy. And Calhoun then stood in broader view before the country than since. His sectional pride and bias had been rarely aroused, and like Clay he seemed to act for the country as an entirety. Subsequent sectional issues changed the views held of him by the people of both the North and South. We have said that Monroe leaned toward internal improvements, but he thought Congress was not clothed by the Constitution with the power to authorize measures supporting it, and when the opportunity was presented (May 4, 1822) he vetoed the bill “for the preservation and repair of the Cumberland road,” and accompanied the veto with a most elaborate message in which he discussed the constitutional aspects of the question. A plain majority of the friends of the administration, under the leadership of Clay, supported the theory of internal improvements from the time the administration began, but were reluctant to permit a division of the party on the question.