Until this personal quarrel was discussed, no other business received attention. The debate--postponed till Jan. 14, 1817, to save the dignity of the House--lasted, to the exclusion of other business, until January 23. As an exhibition of personal and corporate character, it was entertaining; but it contained little of permanent interest or value. Calhoun, always above his subject, spoke with much force against yielding to popular outcry. “This House,” he said, “is the foundation of the fabric of our liberty. So happy is its constitution, that in all instances of a general nature its duty and its interests are inseparable. If he understood correctly the structure of our government, the prevailing principle is not so much a balance of power, as a well-connected chain of responsibility. That responsibility commenced here, and this House is the centre of its operation.” The idea that the people had “resolved the government into its original elements, and resumed to themselves their primitive power of legislation,” was inconsistent with the idea that responsibility commenced and centred in the House. “Are we bound in all cases to do what is popular?” asked Calhoun. Could the House shift responsibility from itself to the people without destroying the foundation of the entire fabric? Like most of Calhoun’s speculations, this question could receive its answer only in some distant future. The Compensation Law lowered permanently the self-respect of the House, which had already declined from the formation of the government. “Of that House,” said Richard Henry Wilde of Georgia,[150] “he feared it might be said in the words of Claudian: ‘A fronte recedant imperii.’ Yes, sir, they were receding,--they had receded from the front of empire. That House, formerly the favorite of the American nation, the first and most important branch of the government, the immediate image of the people, had been losing, and continued to lose,--certainly by no fault of theirs, but by the working of causes not for him to develop,--that rank and power in the government originally belonging to them, and which others at their expense had been secretly acquiring.” Yet the House, while repealing the law, refused to admit itself in the wrong. The law was repealed only so far as it applied to subsequent Congresses. Leaving its successors to fix whatever compensation they thought proper for their services, the Fourteenth Congress adhered to its own scale, and took the money it was expected to refund. Having disposed of this personal affair, the House turned to serious business, and completed its remarkable career by enacting several measures of far-reaching importance.