When Crowninshield sat down, John Randolph took the floor. In Randolph’s long career of oratorical triumphs, no such moment had offered itself before, or was to occur again. Still in Virginian eyes the truest and ablest Republican in Congress, the representative of power and principle, the man of the future, Randolph stood with the halo of youth, courage, and genius round his head,--a sort of Virginian Saint Michael, almost terrible in his contempt for whatever seemed to him base or untrue. He began by saying that he entered on the subject “manacled, handcuffed, and tongue-tied;” his lips were sealed; he could but “hobble over the subject as well as his fettered limbs and palsied tongue would enable him to do it;” and with this preamble he fell upon Gregg and Crowninshield:[127]-- “It is mere waste of time to reason with such persons; they do not deserve anything like serious refutation. The proper arguments for such statesmen are a strait-waistcoat, a dark room, water-gruel, and depletion.” The proposed confiscation of British property called out a sneer at Crowninshield:-- “God help you if these are your ways and means for carrying on war! if your finances are in the hands of such a chancellor of the exchequer! Because a man can take an observation and keep a log-book and a reckoning, can navigate a cock-boat to the West Indies or the East, shall he aspire to navigate the great vessel of State, to stand at the helm of public councils? _Ne sutor ultra crepidam!_” Again and again he turned aside to express contempt for the Northern democrats:-- “Shall this great mammoth of the American forest leave his native element and plunge into the water in a mad contest with the shark? Let him stay on shore, and not be excited by the muscles and periwinkles on the strand!” On the point of policy Randolph took ground which, if not warlike, was at least consistent,--the ground which all Southern Republicans of the Jefferson school would have taken, if shame had not withheld them. Even if determined in the end to submit, the President and Secretary wished to keep up the form of resistance. Randolph declared that the form was absurd; he would do nothing to protect “this mushroom, this fungus of war,”--a carrying-trade which at the first moment of peace would no longer exist:-- “I will never consent to go to war for that which I cannot protect. I deem it no sacrifice of dignity to say to the Leviathan of the deep: We are unable to contend with you in your own element; but if you come within our actual limits, we will shed our last drop of blood in their defence.”