If Clay had failed to embarrass the Administration on the tariff, the keen Jacksonian politicians were to be more successful in embarrassing Clay on the land question. This was a peculiarly delicate subject for Clay to touch in the midst of the campaign. In the Southern and Western States more than 1,090,000,000 acres remained the property of the National Government--a vast empire. The proceeds from the sale of these lands had been originally dedicated to the payment of the national debt; and now with the extinguishment of the debt in sight, all manner of schemes were advanced as to the future disposition of the lands and the proceeds. For a number of years Benton, with characteristic tenacity, had been urging his plan of graduated prices, with free grants to actual settlers, and he had won Jackson over to his theory with Edmund Burke’s proposition, advanced in his speech on the disposition of the crown lands in England, that the principal revenue to be had from uncultivated tracts “springs from the improvement of the population of the kingdom.” The sturdy Missourian looked with repugnance upon the idea of considering these uncultivated acres as sources of revenue, rather than as an opportunity for settlers, and he gradually converted the Democratic Party to his point of view. To make matters all the more embarrassing to Clay, his party had been placed in the position of deliberately withholding this vast domain from the axe of the pioneer and the spade of the cultivator, in the interest of the manufacturers of the East. This had resulted from the unfortunate wording of an official report of Richard Rush, a colleague of Clay’s in the Cabinet of Adams, in which he had lamented the preference of the American people for agricultural over manufacturing pursuits. The report had been referred to Clay whose practiced political eye instantly saw the possibilities in the perversion or exaggeration of the meaning of these paragraphs, and he had fruitlessly urged their elimination. The Democrats were quick to grasp their opportunity. The protectionists, Clay and his friends, planned that the National Government should, by holding on to the lands, retard their settlement by maintaining prices prohibitive to the settler; they proposed to maintain a large labor market in the industrial labor centers of the East where competition would be keen enough to keep down wages. For the sake of the protected interests, they were ready to sacrifice the opportunities of the poor of the Eastern cities and make them the galley slaves of the factories; retard the development of the West, and immolate the national interest on the altar of greed. And there was just enough truth in these charges, rather luridly put forth, to make them exceedingly dangerous in a presidential year.