From a clerk in a country store to a bookkeeper, then a copyist for a lawyer, a writer of letters for the neighborhood, a reader of law, and next a lawyer, were easy and natural steps for this ambitious boy.

Virginia with its older settlements offered small opportunities, and so we find young Clay going West, and landing at Lexington when twenty years old.  He requested a license to practise law, but the Bar Association, which consisted of about a dozen members, decided that no more lawyers were needed at Lexington.  Clay demanded that he should be examined as to fitness, and the blackberry-bush Blackstones sat upon him, as a coroner would say, with intent to give him so stiff an examination that he would be glad to get work as a farmhand.

A dozen questions had been asked, and an attempt had been made to confuse and browbeat the youth, when the Nestor of the Lexington Bar expectorated at a fly ten feet away, and remarked, “Oh, the devil! there is no need of tryin’ to keep a boy like this down—­he’s as fit as we, or fitter!”

And so he was admitted.

From the very first he was a success; he toned up the mental qualities of the Fayette County Bar, and made the older, easy-going members feel to see whether their laurel wreaths were in place.

When he was thirty years of age he was chosen by the Legislature of Kentucky as United States Senator.  When his term expired he chose to go to Congress, probably because it afforded better opportunity for oratory and leadership.  As soon as he appeared upon the floor he was chosen Speaker by acclamation.  So thoroughly American was he, that one of his very first suggestions was to the effect that every member should clothe himself wholly in fabrics made in the United States.  Humphrey Marshall ridiculed the proposition and called Clay a demagogue, for which he got himself straightway challenged.  Clay shot a bullet through his English-made broadcloth coat, and then they shook hands.

When his term as Congressman expired, he again went to the Senate, and served two years.  Then he went back to the House, and through his influence, and his alone, did we challenge Great Britain, just as he had challenged Marshall.

England accepted the challenge, and we call it the War of Eighteen Hundred Twelve.

Very often, indeed, do we hear the rural statesmen at Fourth of July celebrations exclaim, “We have whipped England twice, and we can do it again!”

We whipped England once, and it is possible we could do it again, but she got the best of us in the War of Eighteen Hundred Twelve.  Henry Clay plunged the country into war to redress certain grievances, and as a peace commissioner he backed out of that war without having a single one of those grievances indemnified or redressed.

After the treaty of peace had been declared and “the war was over,” that fighting Irishman, Andrew Jackson, Irishlike, gave the British a black eye at New Orleans, just for luck, and this is the only thing in that whole misunderstanding of which we should not as a nation be ashamed.