“I thank the Senator,” he said, “for the candid avowal, that unless the President will sign such a charter as will suit the directors, they intend to interfere in the election, and endeavor to displace him. With the same candor I state, that after this declaration, this charter shall never be renewed with my consent.... Sir, if under these circumstances the charter is renewed, the elective franchise is destroyed, and the liberties and prosperity of the people are delivered over to this moneyed institution, to be disposed of at their discretion. Against this I enter my solemn protest.” Even the most ardent supporters of Clay will hardly point to his speech on the Veto as evidence of his power. Compared with Webster’s or White’s, it was mere froth, lacking in both substance and style, and only notable in its insistence that the failure of the recharter would be fatal to the West, as the continuance of Jackson in office would be subversive of all government. The reply of Benton was characteristic in its slashing style, its exhaustive appeal to facts and figures, and chiefly important as a campaign argument in its elaborate discussion of the relations of the Bank with the Western States. Not to be outdone in dire predictions, he insisted that the triumph of the Bank would mean the end of free institutions; that “no individual could stand in the States against the power of the Bank, and the Bank flushed with the victory over the conqueror of the conquerors of Bonaparte”; that “an oligarchy would be immediately established, and that oligarchy, in a few generations, would ripen into a monarchy.” He realized that all nations must ultimately perish. “Rome had her Pharsalia and Greece her Chæronea, and this Republic, more illustrious in her birth, was entitled to a death as glorious as theirs.” He would not have her “die by poison” or “perish in corruption,” but “a field of arms and glory should be her end.”