Statesman Calhoun is among these ill-guided ones of topsy-turvy patriotism. Blurred by ambition, soured of disappointment, license and liberty have grown with him to be unconscious synonyms. The laws against treason carry only a remonstrance, never a warning, and--as he reads them--but deplore that civic villainy, while threatening nothing of grief for what dark souls shall be guilty of it. In this frame the General's stark sentiment, “The Federal Union! It must be preserved!” and that subsequent hanging promise which, by the mouth of the suave insinuating one, he sends to “the good folk of South Carolina,” go beyond surprise with Statesman Calhoun, and provide a shock. It is as though, walking in a trance of treason, he knocks his head against the White House wall; his awakening is rudely, painfully complete. That dream of a separate nation, with himself at its head, gives way to hangman visions of rope and gallows tree; and, from bending his energies to methods by which he may take South Carolina out of the Union, he gives himself wholly to the more tremulous enterprise of keeping himself out of jail. Some hint of that recent literature, which the General found so interesting, gets abroad, and many go reading the lucid dictum of old Marshall. Treason as a crime becomes better understood; and--by Statesman Calhoun at least--better feared. Moved of these fears, Statesman Calhoun sends message after message into his restless Palmetto-rattlesnake State of South Carolina commanding, nay imploring, a present suspension of “Nullification.” His Palmetto-rattlesnake adherents, while not understanding the danger which fringes them about, have already found enough that is alarming in the very air; and, for their own safety as much as his, are heedful to regard that prayer for a “Nullification” passivity. The South Carolina shouting ceases; the Minute Men rest on their traitorous arms; the manufacture of blue cockades is abandoned; while the Columbia convention devotes itself to innocuous adjournments from innocent day to day. While Palmetto-rattlesnake affairs are thus timidly quiescent, the Senate itself--having read old Marshall, and being, moreover, somewhat instructed by the watchful attitude of the General, who sits in the White House a figure of frowning menace, both relentless and fateful--devotes itself to the scaffold extrication of Statesman Calhoun. Machiavelli Clay leads the rescue party. His is of an opposite political church to that of Statesman Calhoun; but the pair meet on the warm, common ground of a deathless hatred of the General. Under the mollifying guidance of Machiavelli Clay, Senator after Senator surrenders those pet schedules of tariff desired of his own people, and puts the surrender on the expressive basis of “saving the neck of Calhoun.”