I then proceeded to take the offensive against Mr. Drake in good earnest. To the great amusement of my hearers I punctured with irony and ridicule the pompous pretence that he was the father of the new constitution with which Missouri was blessed. I took up his assault upon the Germans. I asked the question, "Who was it that at the beginning of the war took prisoners the rebel force assembled in camp Jackson and thus saved St. Louis and the State to the Union, and who was foremost on all the bloody fields in Missouri?" The whole audience shouted "The Germans! The Germans!" I asked where Mr. Drake was in those critical days, and answered that having been a Democrat before the war, pleading the cause of slavery, he sat quietly in his law office, coolly calculating when it would be safe for him to pronounce himself openly for the Union, while the Germans were shedding their blood for that Union. This was a terrible thrust. My unfortunate victim nervously jumped to his feet and called my friend, General McNeil, who was present, to witness that the General himself advised him to stay quietly at home, because he could do better service there than twenty men in the field. Whereupon General McNeil promptly answered: "Yes, but that was long after the beginning of the war"--an answer which made Mr. Drake sink back into his chair, while the meeting burst out in a peal of laughter. Soon he rose again to say that I was wrong in imputing to him any hostility to the Germans, for he was their friend. My reply instantly followed that then we had to take what he had said of them to-night as a specimen of Mr. Drake's characteristic friendship. The audience again roared with laughter. But the sharpest arrow was still to be shot. I reviewed the Senator's career as a party leader--how he had hurled his anathema against every Republican who would not take his word as law, thus disgusting and alienating one man after another, and was now seeking to read out of the party every man and every newspaper, among them the strongest journal in the State, that supported me. Almost every sentence drew applause. But when I reached my climax, picturing Mr. Drake as a party leader so thinning out his following that he would finally stand "lonesome and forlorn, surrounded by an immensity of solitude, in desolate self-appreciation," the general hilarity became so boisterous and the cheering so persistent, that I had to wait minutes for a chance to proceed. I closed my speech in a pacific strain. There had been talk that, if I were elected, the unseemly spectacle would be presented of two Senators from the same State constantly quarrelling with one another. I did not apprehend anything of the kind. I was sure that if we ever differed, Senator Drake would respect my freedom of opinion, and I certainly would respectfully recognize his. Our watchword would be: "Let us have peace."