But in the end it was not the opposition of Democratic Senators that suddenly terminated the consideration of the Webster compromise. It was soon found that the friends of the Bank were hopelessly divided on any constructive programme. Even in the inner Bank circles there were clashing views. Biddle favored the Webster plan; Sergeant, the chief counsel, and Binney, leading spokesman in the House, preferred the Calhoun measure. Even these differences might have been reconciled but for the selfishness of Clay, who persisted in his determination to use the Bank for party purposes. “If Mr. C [Clay] and Mr. C [Calhoun] would go along with us,” Webster wrote Biddle, “we could carry the compromise bill through the Senate by a strong two thirds majority. Can you write through anybody to talk with Mr. Calhoun?”[720] In the meanwhile Calhoun was attempting the conversion of such Administration Senators as Benton and Silas Wright, without success. While these negotiations were in progress, the fury of Clay over the independence of Webster increased in intensity, culminating in the threat that, if the New Englander failed to move to lay his own motion on the table, he would make the motion himself. Thus, one week after the delivery of his speech, Webster killed his own measure. When, with the explanation that he had been disappointed in his hopes, he made the motion to table, John Forsyth demanded the yeas and nays to show that Webster’s bill had not been killed by the Administration Senators, but by his own party friends. The roll-call showed practically all the Bank Senators voting to table, with Benton, Forsyth, White, Hill, Wright, and Grundy voting against the motion. Thus the only practical and constructive attempt made by the friends of the Bank to save the institution was slaughtered in the house of its friends.[721] V With the accumulating evidence of impatience in the country, Clay at length determined to bring to a vote the resolutions, submitted merely to irritate and provoke a debate that would give the panic time to act. So firmly was Clay convinced that the “disciplining” of the people was working the destruction of Jackson’s popularity, that he sought to transfer a portion of his fancied resentment to Van Buren, who was all but certain to be the Democratic nominee in 1836.[722] There has probably never been a more transparent bit of histrionics perpetrated upon a deliberative body than that of Clay in his pathetic appeal to Van Buren, seated in the chair, and with a padlock on his lips, to hasten to Jackson with a plea for the suffering people.