Again, there are now in this State persons employed under government, allowed to be pretty good Whigs, still holding their offices; collectors, district attorneys, postmasters, marshals.  What is to become of them in this separation?  Which side are they to fall?  Are they to resign? or is this resolution to be held up to government as an invitation or a provocation to turn them out?  Our distinguished fellow-citizen, who, with so much credit to himself and to his country, represents our government in England,[3]—­is he expected to come home, on this separation, and yield his place to his predecessor,[4] or to somebody else?  And in regard to the individual who addresses you,—­what do his brother Whigs mean to do with him?  Where do they mean to place me?  Generally, when a divorce takes place, the parties divide their children.  I am anxious to know where, in the case of this divorce, I shall fall.  This declaration announces a full and final separation between the Whigs of Massachusetts and the President.  If I choose to remain in the President’s councils, do these gentlemen mean to say that I cease to be a Massachusetts Whig?  I am quite ready to put that question to the people of Massachusetts.

I would not treat this matter too lightly, nor yet too seriously.  I know very well that, when public bodies get together, resolutions can never be considered with any degree of deliberation.  They are passed as they are presented.  Who the honorable gentlemen were who drew this resolution I do not know.  I suspect that they had not much meaning in it, and that they have not very clearly defined what little meaning they had.  They were angry; they were resentful; they had drawn up a string of charges against the President,—­a bill of indictment, as it were,—­and, to close the whole, they introduced this declaration about “a full and final separation.”  I could not read this, of course, without perceiving that it had an intentional or unintentional bearing on my position; and therefore it was proper for me to allude to it here.

Gentlemen, there are some topics on which it has been my fortune to differ from my old friends.  They may be right on these topics; very probably they are; but I am sure I am right in maintaining my opinions, such as they are, when I have formed them honestly and on deliberation.  There seems to me to be a disposition to postpone all attempts to do good to the country to some future and uncertain day.  Yet there is a Whig majority in each house of Congress, and I am of opinion that now is the time to accomplish what yet remains to be accomplished.  Some gentlemen are for suffering the present Congress to expire; another Congress to be chosen, and to expire also; a third Congress to be chosen, and then, if there shall be a Whig majority in both branches, and a Whig President, they propose to take up highly important and pressing subjects.  These are persons, Gentlemen, of more sanguine temperament than myself.  “Confidence,”