“Who would have believed,” asked John Randolph,[145] six months afterward,--“who would have believed,” he repeated, “that the people of the United States would have borne all the privations and losses of the late war, and of the measures that led to it; that they would have quietly regarded a national debt, swelled to an amount unknown,--to an amount greater than the whole expense of our seven years’ war; that they would have seen the election of President taken out of their hands [by the caucus]; that they would have borne with abuse and peculation through every department of the government,--and that the great Leviathan, which slept under all these grievances, should be roused into action by the Fifteen-Hundred-Dollar Law?” Only with difficulty could members persuade themselves that the public anger was real. They could not at first conceive that the people should be seriously angry because Congress had thought proper to pay its members a sum not in itself extravagant or adequate to their services. Not until the members returned to their homes did they appreciate the force of public feeling; but they soon felt themselves helpless to resist it. Richard M. Johnson and Henry Clay, the two most popular men in Kentucky, found their entire constituency attacking them. “When I went home,” said Clay,[146] “I do not recollect to have met with one solitary individual of any description of party who was not opposed to the Act,--who did not, on some ground or other, think it an improper and unjust law.” Benjamin Hardin,[147] another of the Kentucky victims, said: “If a man came into the county court to be appointed a constable or surveyor of the road, he entered his solemn protest against the Compensation Law. If a petty demagogue wanted to get into the legislature, he must post up, or put in the newspapers, his protest against it.” “There was at first a violent excitement,” said Philip P. Barbour of Virginia;[148] “gentlemen might call it, if they pleased, a storm. But that storm, even when its fury abated, subsided into a fixed and settled discontent at the measure; it met the disapprobation and excited the discontent of the grave, the reflecting, and the deliberate; and such he believed to be the case with an immense majority of the American people.”