government of a State and the directory of a moneyed corporation.

Sir, I think it right, in approaching the termination of this great
question, to present this faint and rapid sketch of the brilliant,
beneficent, and glorious administration of President Jackson. It is not
for me to attempt to do it justice; it is not for ordinary men to
attempt its history. His military life, resplendent with dazzling
events, will demand the pen of a nervous writer; his civil
administration, replete with scenes which have called into action so
many and such various passions of the human heart, and which has given
to native sagacity so many victories over practised politicians, will
require the profound, luminous, and philosophical conceptions of a Livy,
a Plutarch, or a Sallust. This history is not to be written in our day.
The contemporaries of such events are not the hands to describe them.
Time must first do its office--must silence the passions, remove the
actors, develop consequences, and canonize all that is sacred to honor,
patriotism, and glory. In after ages the historic genius of our America
shall produce the writers which the subject demands--men far removed
from the contests of this day, who will know how to estimate this great
epoch, and how to acquire an immortality for their own names by
painting, with a master's hand, the immortal events of the patriot
President's life.

And now, sir, I finish the task which, three years ago, I imposed on
myself. Solitary and alone, and amidst the jeers and taunts of my
opponents, I put this ball in motion. The people have taken it up, and
rolled it forward, and I am no longer anything but a unit in the vast
mass which now propels it. In the name of that mass I speak. I demand
the execution of the edict of the people; I demand the expurgation of
that sentence which the voice of a few senators, and the power of their
confederate, the Bank of the United States, has caused to be placed on
the journal of the Senate; and which the voice of millions of freemen
has ordered to be expunged from it.

End of Project Gutenberg's American Eloquence, Volume I. (of 4), by Various

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