n, we find no indication there of
the latent traitor. He was merely a very active, energetic member of
the Republican party; supporting the war by assiduous labors in
committee, and by intense declamation of the kind of which we have
given a specimen. In all his speeches there is not a touch of
greatness. He declared that Demosthenes was his model,--an orator who
was a master of all the arts? all the artifices, 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