Such a provision for filling the ranks could not be called excessive. Even if the whole bounty were added to the pay, and the soldier were to serve but twelve months, he would receive only twenty dollars a month and his land-certificate. If he served his whole term of five years, he received little more than twelve dollars a month. The inducement was not great in such a community as the United States. The chance that such a measure would fill the ranks was small; yet the measure seemed extravagant to a party that had formerly pledged itself against mercenary armies. If the bill showed the timidity of the Republicans, it called out worse qualities in the Federalists. The speeches of the opposition were for the most part general in their criticisms and denunciations, and deserved little attention; but that of Daniel Webster was doubly interesting, because Webster was not only the ablest but among the most cautious of his party. His speech[475] suggested much of the famous eloquence of his later oratory, but dwelt on ideas to which his later life was opposed, and followed lines of argument surprising in a statesman of his great intellectual powers. His chief theme was the duty of government to wage only a defensive war, except on the ocean. “Give up your futile projects of invasion. Extinguish the fires that blaze on your inland frontiers.” He wished the government to use its forces only to repel invasion. “The enemy, as we have seen, can make no permanent stand in any populous part of the country. Its citizens will drive back his forces to the line; but at that line where defence ceases and invasion begins, they stop. They do not pass it because they do not choose to pass it. Offering no serious obstacle to their actual power, it rises like a Chinese wall against their sentiments and their feelings.” This advice, which echoed a Federalist idea reasonable or excusable in 1812, was out of place in January, 1814. The battles of Leipzig and Vittoria had settled the question of offensive and defensive in Canada. The offensive had passed into British hands, and a successful defence was all that the United States could hope. The interests of New England as well as of New York and of the whole Union required that the defensive campaign should, if possible, be fought on Canadian soil rather than at Plattsburg, Washington, or New Orleans; and even the most extreme Federalist could scarcely be believed blind to an idea so obvious.