and all the tricks by which a mass of ignorant and turbulent hearers can be kept attentive, but who has nothing to impart to a member of Congress who honestly desires to convince his equals.  Mr. Calhoun’s harangues in the supposed Demosthenean style gave him, however, great reputation out of doors, while his diligence, his dignified and courteous manners, gained him warm admirers on the floor.  He was a messmate of Mr. Clay at this time.  Besides agreeing in politics, they were on terms of cordial personal intimacy.  Henry Clay, Speaker of the House, was but five years older than Calhoun, and in everything but years much younger.  Honest patriots pointed to these young men with pride and hope, congratulating each other that, though the Revolutionary statesmen were growing old and passing away, the high places of the Republic would be filled, in due time, by men worthy to succeed them.

When the war was over, a strange thing was to be noted in the politics of the United States:  the Federal party was dead, but the Republican party had adopted its opinions.  The disasters of the war had convinced almost every man of the necessity of investing the government with the power to wield the resources of the country more readily; and, accordingly, we find leading Republicans, like Judge Story, John Quincy Adams, and Mr. Clay, favoring the measures which had formerly been the special rallying-cries of the Federalists.  Judge Story spoke the feeling of his party when he wrote, in 1815: 

“Let us extend the national authority over the whole extent of power given by the Constitution.  Let us have great military and naval schools, an adequate regular army, the broad foundations laid of a permanent navy, a national bank, a national bankrupt act,”

etc., etc.  The strict-constructionists were almost silenced in the general cry, “Let us be a Nation.”  In the support of all the measures to which this feeling gave rise, especially the national bank, internal improvements, and a protective tariff, Mr. Calhoun went as far as any man, and farther than most; for such at that time was the humor of the planters.

To the principle of a protective tariff he was peculiarly committed.  It had not been his intention to take part in the debates on the Tariff Bill of 1816.  On the 6th of April, while he was busy writing in a committee-room, Mr. Samuel D. Ingham of Pennsylvania, his particular friend and political ally, came to him and said that the House had fallen into some confusion while discussing the tariff bill, and added, that, as it was “difficult to rally so large a body when once broken on a tax bill,” he wished Mr. Calhoun would speak on the question in order to keep the House together.  “What can I say?” replied the member from South Carolina.  Mr. Ingham, however, persisted, and Mr. Calhoun addressed the House.  An amendment had just been introduced to leave cotton goods unprotected, a proposition which