“After you have raised these twenty-five thousand men,” said Randolph, “if I may reason on an impossibility,--for it has, I think, been demonstrated that these men cannot be raised, it will be an army on paper only,--shall we form a Committee of Public Safety, or shall we depute the power to the Speaker--I should not wish it in safer hands--to carry on the war? Shall we declare that the Executive, not being capable of discerning the public interest, or not having spirit to pursue it, we have appointed a committee to take the President and Cabinet into custody?... You have an agent to execute certain business; he asks from you a certain amount for effecting the business on hand; you give him double,--you force it upon him, you compel him to waste it!” Again the Federalists decided the result. Half of the Federalist members voted with the extreme war Republicans. The House, by sixty-seven votes to sixty, abandoned its amendments; the bill passed, as Giles had framed it, and January 11 received the President’s signature. CHAPTER VIII. The Army Bill was understood to decide not so much the war as the change in domestic politics. That the party of Jefferson, Madison, Gallatin, and Monroe should establish a standing army of thirty-five thousand troops in time of peace, when no foreign nation threatened attack, and should do this avowedly for purposes of conquest, passed the bounds of inconsistency and proclaimed a revolution. This radical change was no longer disguised. Clay, Calhoun, Grundy, Lowndes, and Cheves made only a bare pretence of respecting the traditions of their party; while Giles, with a quality peculiar to himself, excused his assaults on Madison by doing public penance for his ancient errors in maligning Washington. “Further information and reflection,” he said, “and practical experience of more than twenty years, have completely convinced me of the superiority of the talent of this great man as a statesman as well as a soldier, and have also admonished me of my former errors.” If in America any politician could be found to whose public character such an admission was fatal, Giles might be regarded as the person; but conduct that ruined Giles’s character only raised the reputations of Clay, Lowndes, and Calhoun. These younger men were not responsible for what had been said and done ten or fifteen years before; they had been concerned in no conspiracy to nullify the laws, or to offer armed resistance to the government; they had never rested their characters as statesmen on the chance of success in governing without armaments, and in coercing Napoleon and Pitt by peaceable means; they had no past to defend or excuse, and as yet no philosophical theories to preach,--but they were obliged to remove from their path the system their party had established, and they worked at this task with more energy and with much more success than they