Congress showed more than usual unwillingness to face its difficulties. The episodes of Erskine and Jackson supplied excuse for long and purposeless debates. In the Senate, December 5, Giles reported from a special committee the draft of a Resolution denouncing Jackson’s conduct as indecorous, insolent, affronting, insidious, false, outrageous, and premeditated,--epithets which seemed to make superfluous the approval of Madison’s course or the pledge of support with which the Resolution ended. Giles reviewed the conduct of Jackson and Canning, entreating the Senate to banish irritation and to restore harmony and mutual good-will, “the most fervent prayer of one who in the present delicate, interesting crisis of the nation feels a devotion for his country beyond everything else on this side of heaven.”[140] The experience of many years warranted Giles’s hearers in suspecting that when he professed a wish for harmony, the hope of harmony must be desperate, for his genius lay in quite another direction; and when he laid aside partisanship, his party had reason to look for some motive still narrower. His course quickly proved the sense in which he understood these phrases. January 3, 1810, the President recommended by message the enlistment for a short period of a volunteer force of twenty thousand men, and a reorganization of the militia; adding that it would rest with Congress also “to determine how far further provision may be expedient for putting into actual service, if necessary, any part of the naval armament not now employed.” No one knew what this language meant. Crawford of Georgia, with his usual bluntness, said:[141] “This Message, in point of obscurity, comes nearer my ideas of a Delphic oracle than any state paper which has come under my inspection. It is so cautiously expressed that every man puts what construction on it he pleases.” Giles pleased to put upon it a warlike construction. January 10 he reported a bill for fitting out the frigates; January 13 he supported this bill in a speech which surprised Federalists and Republicans alike, if they could be still surprised at the varieties of Giles’s political philosophy.