None of Mr. Clay’s speeches on this question were published. He had been constrained by the voice of his State and fears for the safety of the Union, but he was not willing to appear before his countrymen and posterity in the lurid light of sustaining slavery. The revolt in Greece enlisted the sympathy of all America. Meetings were held to declare the prevailing sentiment. Albert Gallatin even proposed to aid with a naval force. Mr. Webster offered a resolution in Congress authorizing a Commissioner to be sent to that country. Mr. Clay supported the motion in his Demosthenean style. After portraying the situation, he added the challenge: “Go home if you can; go home if you dare, to your constituents, and tell them that you voted this proposition down; meet if you can, the appalling countenances of those who sent you here, and tell them that you shrank from the declaration of your own sentiments; that you can not tell how, but that some unknown dread, some indescribable apprehension, some indefinable danger, drove you away from your purpose; that the spectres of cimiters, and crowns, and crescents, gleamed before you and alarmed you; and that you suppressed all the noble feelings prompted by religion, by liberty, by national independence, and by humanity.” Mr. Clay had been already placed in the field as a candidate for President, and this temerity astonished his supporters. He had enemies, likewise, to take advantage of his excitable temper, to irritate him to personal altercation. John Randolph was conspicuous. He taunted Mr. Clay for his defective education. “I know my deficiencies,” Mr. Clay replied. “I was born to no patrimonial estate; from my father I inherited only infancy, ignorance and indigence. I feel my defects; but so far as my situation in early life is concerned, I may without presumption say they are more my misfortune than my fault.”