Under Gallatin’s teaching, Crawford bade fair to make himself, what the South so greatly needed, a statesman who understood its interests; but he was far in advance of his people. The society from which he sprang was more correctly represented by Giles, who answered him in the manner for which the Virginia senator had acquired unpleasant notoriety. February 14 John Randolph, who with all his faults was not so factious as to join in the scheme of the State banks, wrote to his friend Nicholson:[271] “Giles made this morning the most unintelligible speech on the Bank of the United States that I ever heard.” Never had Giles taken more trouble to be judicial, candid, and temperate; no one could have admitted with more impartiality the force of his opponent’s arguments; but his instincts, stronger than his logic, compelled him to vote against the Bank. The conclusion was as certain as the process was vague. Henry Clay, who followed on the same side, ironically complimented the Virginia senator, who had “certainly demonstrated to the satisfaction of all who heard him both that it was constitutional and unconstitutional, highly proper and improper, to prolong the charter of the Bank;” but Clay’s irony was as unfortunate as Giles’s logic. The sarcasm thrown at Giles recoiled on Clay himself, for he passed the rest of his life in contradicting and repenting the speech he made at this moment, in which he took ground against the power of Congress to create corporations. “The power to charter companies is not specified in the grant, and, I contend, is of a nature not transferable by mere implication. It is one of the most exalted attributes of sovereignty.” The legislation of twenty years which enforced the opposite opinion he swept aside in his peculiar manner. “This doctrine of precedents, applied to the legislature, appears to me to be fraught with the most mischievous consequences.” With more than his ordinary self-confidence, he affirmed that the Treasury could be as well conducted without as with the Bank; and he closed with a burst of rhetoric hardly to be paralleled in his oratory, by holding the Bank responsible for not preventing Great Britain from attacking the “Chesapeake,” impressing American seamen, and issuing the Orders in Council. Clay’s excuse for extravagances like these was neither his youth nor his ignorance of affairs nor his obedience to instructions, nor yet a certain want of tact which made him through life the victim of needless mistakes, but was rather the simple repentance with which, within five years, he threw himself on the mercy of the public, admitting that had he foreseen the effect of his course he would have acted in a very different way.[272] Even for Giles some apology might be made, for no one could deny that consistency required him to vote as he did, and he could appeal to the record in his defence. The worst offender was not Giles or Clay, but Samuel Smith.