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 to destruction, to you may
appear a perfectly amiable, peaceful, unprovoking procedure; but it does
not appear so to us. So to call such an act, to us appears no other than
a naked, impudent absurdity, and we speak of it accordingly. But if, when
the war had begun, and had become the cause of the country, the giving
of our money and our blood, in common with yours, was support of the
war, then it is not true that we have always opposed the war. With few
individual exceptions, you have constantly had our votes here for all the
necessary supplies. And, more than this, you have had the services, the
blood, and the lives of our political brethren in every trial and on
every field. The beardless boy and the mature man, the humble and the
distinguished--you have had them. Through suffering and death, by disease
and in battle they have endured and fought and fell with y