rechartering of a United States Bank; and a bill passed by both Houses for that purpose, which had been indeed the main purpose of the leading Whigs in promoting the election of Harrison and Tyler, was twice vetoed by him. This was the first lesson given to the American people of the potential importance of the Vice-Presidency in case of the death or disability of the President. Curiously enough, the same lesson, which has been repeated several times since, has, in every instance, with one exception, followed upon the election of a President by Anti-Democratic votes. Henry Clay, who was enthusiastically nominated and supported by the “Whig” party for the Presidency at the close of President Tyler’s administration in 1844, was defeated by the Democratic nominee, Mr. Polk of Tennessee, under whom the annexation of the magnificent Republic of Texas to the United States was consummated, with its inevitable corollary of a war with Mexico, that republic refusing to acknowledge the right of the people of Texas to sever their connection with the Mexican States. This war led immediately to the cession by Mexico to the United States of New Mexico, California, and the Northern Pacific coast of the old Spanish dominions in North America, and ultimately to the settlement of the boundary lines on the Pacific between the dominions of Great Britain and the United States. At the close of President Polk’s administration, the “Whigs,” who had been disheartened and “demoralised” by the defeat of their “magnetic” leader, Henry Clay, in 1844, made a second effort to capture executive power. The occasion was offered to them by a schism in the Democratic party, which had begun on personal grounds when Ex-President Van Buren, who desired a renomination, was set aside in 1844 for Mr. Polk, and which was intensified on broader issues by the determination of many Northern Democrats not to permit the extension of slavery into the vast and splendid territories acquired under President Polk.