conquering Canada, and carrying the American flag to Mobile and Key West. After ten years devoted to weakening national energies, such freshness of youth and recklessness of fear had wonderful popular charm. The reaction from Jefferson’s system threatened to be more violent than its adoption. Experience seemed to show that a period of about twelve years measured the beat of the pendulum. After the Declaration of Independence, twelve years had been needed to create an efficient Constitution; another twelve years of energy brought a reaction against the government then created; a third period of twelve years was ending in a sweep toward still greater energy; and already a child could calculate the result of a few more such returns. Had the majority of the House been in a gentler mood, its choice for Speaker should have fallen on Macon, once more a sound party man prepared to support war; but Macon was set aside. Bibb of Georgia, a candidate of the minority, received only thirty-eight voices, while seventy-five were given for Henry Clay. Clay was barely thirty-four years of age, and was a new member of the House; but he was the boldest and most active leader of the war Republicans. He immediately organized the committees for war. That on Foreign Relations, the most immediately important, was put into the hands of Porter, Calhoun, and Grundy. Military affairs were placed in charge of David R. Williams. Langdon Cheves became chairman of the Naval Committee. Ezekiel Bacon and Cheves stood at the head of the Ways and Means. November 5 the President’s Message was read, and its account of the situation seemed to offer hardly the chance of peace. England, it said, had refused the “reasonable step” of repealing its Orders in return for the extinction of the French Decrees; while the new British minister had made “an indispensable condition of the repeal of the British Orders, that commerce should be restored to a footing that would admit the productions and manufactures of Great Britain, when owned by neutrals, into markets shut against them by her enemies,--the United States being given to understand that in the mean time a continuation of their Non-importation Act would lead to measures of retaliation.” Instead of repealing the orders, the British government, “at a moment when least to have been expected,” put them into more rigorous execution; “indemnity and redress for other wrongs have continued to be withheld; and our coasts and the mouths of our harbors have again witnessed scenes not less derogatory to the dearest of our national rights than vexatious to the regular course of our trade.” In some respects Madison’s statement of grievances sounded almost needlessly quarrelsome; yet even in this list of causes which were to warrant a declaration of war, the President did not expressly mention impressments, in comparison with which his other grievances sank, in the afterthought, to insignificance.