These accounts have already been discussed some here; but when we are amongst them, as when we are in the Patent Office, we must peep about a good deal before we can see all the curiosities.  I shall not be tedious with them.  As to the large item of $1500 per year—­amounting in the aggregate to $26,715 for office rent, clerk hire, fuel, etc., I barely wish to remark that, so far as I can discover in the public documents, there is no evidence, by word or inference, either from any disinterested witness or of General Cass himself, that he ever rented or kept a separate office, ever hired or kept a clerk, or even used any extra amount of fuel, etc., in consequence of his Indian services.  Indeed, General Cass’s entire silence in regard to these items, in his two long letters urging his claims upon the government, is, to my mind, almost conclusive that no such claims had any real existence.

But I have introduced General Cass’s accounts here chiefly to show the wonderful physical capacities of the man.  They show that he not only did the labor of several men at the same time, but that he often did it at several places, many hundreds of miles apart, at the same time.  And at eating, too, his capacities are shown to be quite as wonderful.  From October, 1821, to May, 1822, he eat ten rations a day in Michigan, ten rations a day here in Washington, and near five dollars’ worth a day on the road between the two places!  And then there is an important discovery in his example—­the art of being paid for what one eats, instead of having to pay for it.  Hereafter if any nice young man should owe a bill which he cannot pay in any other way, he can just board it out.  Mr. Speaker, we have all heard of the animal standing in doubt between two stacks of hay and starving to death.  The like of that would never happen to General Cass.  Place the stacks a thousand miles apart, he would stand stock-still midway between them, and eat them both at once, and the green grass along the line would be apt to suffer some, too, at the same time.  By all means make him President, gentlemen.  He will feed you bounteously—­if—­if there is any left after he shall have helped himself.

But, as General Taylor is, par excellence, the hero of the Mexican War, and as you Democrats say we Whigs have always opposed the war, you think it must be very awkward and embarrassing for us to go for General Taylor.  The declaration that we have always opposed the war is true or false, according as one may understand the term “oppose the war.”  If to say “the war was unnecessarily and unconstitutionally commenced by the President” by opposing the war, then the Whigs have very generally opposed it.  Whenever they have spoken at all, they have said this; and they have said it on what has appeared good reason to them.  The marching an army into the midst of a peaceful Mexican settlement, frightening the inhabitants away, leaving their growing crops and other property