He endured St. Petersburg for the space of ten days, then sailed for England, and never saw Russia again. When the appropriation bill was before Congress at the next session, opposition members did not fail to call in question the justice of requiring the people of the United States to pay twenty thousand dollars for Mr. Randolph's ten days' work, or, to speak more exactly, for Mr. Randolph's apology for the President's bad spelling; but the item passed, nevertheless. During the reign of Andrew Jackson, Congress was little more than a board of registry for the formal recording of his edicts. There are those who think, at the present moment, that what a President hath done, a President may do again. It was fortunate that John Randolph was in retirement when Calhoun brought on his Nullification scheme. The presence in Congress of a man so eloquent and so reckless, whose whole heart and mind were with the Nullifiers, might have prevented the bloodless postponement of the struggle. He was in constant correspondence with the South Carolina leaders, and was fully convinced that it was the President of the United States, not "the Hamiltons and Haynes" of South Carolina, who ought to seize the first pretext to concede the point in dispute. No citizen of South Carolina was more indignant than he at General Jackson's Proclamation. He said that, if the people did not rouse themselves to a sense of their condition, and "put down this wretched old man," the country was irretrievably ruined; and he spoke of the troops despatched to Charleston as "mercenaries," to whom he hoped "no quarter would be given." The "wretched old man" whom the people were to "put down" was Andrew Jackson, not John C. Calhoun. We do not forget that, when John Randolph uttered these words, he was scarcely an accountable being. Disease had reduced him to a skeleton, and robbed him of almost every attribute of man except his capacity to suffer. But even in his madness he was a representative man, and spoke the latent feeling of his class. The diseases which sharpened his temper unloosed his tongue; he revealed the tendency of the Southern mind, as a petulant child reveals family secrets. In his good and in his evil he was an exaggerated Southerner of the higher class. He was like them, too, in this: they are not criminals to be punished, but patients to be cured. Sometimes, of late, we have feared that they resemble him also in being incurable.