But, while declining to reopen the argument of this question, and refusing to tread over again the ground already traversed, there is another and a different task to perform; one which the approaching termination of President Jackson’s administration makes peculiarly proper at this time, and which it is my privilege, and perhaps my duty, to execute, as being the suitable conclusion to the arduous contest in which we have been so long engaged.  I allude to the general tenor of his administration, and to its effect, for good or for evil, upon the condition of his country.  This is the proper time for such a view to be taken.  The political existence of this great man now draws to a close.  In little more than forty days he ceases to be an object of political hope to any, and should cease to be an object of political hate, or envy, to all.  Whatever of motive the servile and time-serving might have found in his exalted station for raising the altar of adulation, and burning the incense of praise before him, that motive can no longer exist.  The dispenser of the patronage of an empire, the chief of this great confederacy of States, is soon to be a private individual, stripped of all power to reward, or to punish.  His own thoughts, as he has shown us in the concluding paragraph of that message which is to be the last of its kind that we shall ever receive from him, are directed to that beloved retirement from which he was drawn by the voice of millions of freemen, and to which he now looks for that interval of repose which age and infirmities require.  Under these circumstances, he ceases to be a subject for the ebullition of the passions, and passes into a character for the contemplation of history.  Historically, then, shall I view him; and limiting this view to his civil administration, I demand, where is there a chief magistrate of whom so much evil has been predicted, and from whom so much good has come?  Never has any man entered upon the chief magistracy of a country under such appalling predictions of ruin and woe! never has any one been so pursued with direful prognostications! never has any one been so beset and impeded by a powerful combination of political and moneyed confederates! never has any one in any country where the administration of justice has risen above the knife or the bowstring, been so lawlessly and shamelessly tried and condemned by rivals and enemies, without hearing, without defence, without the forms of law and justice!  History has been ransacked to find examples of tyrants sufficiently odious to illustrate him by comparison.  Language has been tortured to find epithets sufficiently strong to paint him in description.  Imagination has been exhausted in her efforts to deck him with revolting and inhuman attributes.  Tyrant, despot, usurper; destroyer of the liberties of his country; rash, ignorant, imbecile; endangering the public peace with all foreign nations; destroying domestic prosperity at home; ruining all industry, all commerce, all manufactures; annihilating