That his views and measures were always the wisest needs not to be affirmed; nor should it be on this occasion, where so many thinking differently join in doing honor to his memory.  A free people in times of peace and quiet when pressed by no common danger-naturally divide into parties.  At such times the man who is of neither party is not, cannot be, of any consequence.  Mr. Clay therefore was of a party.  Taking a prominent part, as he did, in all the great political questions of his country for the last half century, the wisdom of his course on many is doubted and denied by a large portion of his countrymen; and of such it is not now proper to speak particularly.  But there are many others, about his course upon which there is little or no disagreement amongst intelligent and patriotic Americans.  Of these last are the War of 1812, the Missouri question, nullification, and the now recent compromise measures.  In 1812 Mr. Clay, though not unknown, was still a young man.  Whether we should go to war with Great Britain being the question of the day, a minority opposed the declaration of war by Congress, while the majority, though apparently inclined to war, had for years wavered, and hesitated to act decisively.  Meanwhile British aggressions multiplied, and grew more daring and aggravated.  By Mr. Clay more than any other man the struggle was brought to a decision in Congress.  The question, being now fully before Congress, came up in a variety of ways in rapid succession, on most of which occasions Mr. Clay spoke.  Adding to all the logic of which the subject was susceptible that noble inspiration which came to him as it came to no other, he aroused and nerved and inspired his friends, and confounded and bore down all opposition.  Several of his speeches on these occasions were reported and are still extant, but the best of them all never was.  During its delivery the reporters forgot their vocation, dropped their pens, and sat enchanted from near the beginning to quite the close.  The speech now lives only in the memory of a few old men, and the enthusiasm with which they cherish their recollection of it is absolutely astonishing.  The precise language of this speech we shall never know; but we do know we cannot help knowing—­that with deep pathos it pleaded the cause of the injured sailor, that it invoked the genius of the Revolution, that it apostrophized the names of Otis, of Henry, and of Washington, that it appealed to the interests, the pride, the honor, and the glory of the nation, that it shamed and taunted the timidity of friends, that it scorned and scouted and withered the temerity of domestic foes, that it bearded and defied the British lion, and, rising and swelling and maddening in its course, it sounded the onset, till the charge, the shock, the steady struggle, and the glorious victory all passed in vivid review before the entranced hearers.