When I look back upon my humble origin, left an orphan too young to have been conscious of a father's smiles and caresses, with a widowed mother, surrounded by a numerous offspring, in the midst of pecuniary embarrassments, without a regular education, without fortune, without friends, without patrons, I have reason to be satisfied with my public career. I ought to be thankful for the high places and honors to which I have been called by the favor and partiality of my countrymen, and I am thankful and grateful. And I shall take with me the pleasing consciousness that, in whatever station I have been placed, I have earnestly and honestly labored to justify their confidence by a faithful, fearless, and zealous discharge of my public duties. Pardon these personal allusions. I make the motion of which notice has been given.

ON THE EXPUNGING RESOLUTION.

IN THE SENATE OF THE UNITED STATES, JANUARY 16, 1837.

[The Senate of the United States, having, in 1834, resolved, by a decisive vote, that the President (Jackson,) in his proceedings in connexion with the Removal of the Deposites, had assumed and exercised power not granted by the Constitution or the laws, but inconsistent with them-Mr. BENTON immediately gave notice that he should move to expunge the same from the journal of the Senate. He made his motion accordingly, but it did not prevail until the session of 1836-7, when a strong Jackson majority having been secured, it was "ressed to a successful issue. On this occasion, Mr. CLAY spoke as follows:]

CONSIDERING that I was the mover of the resolution of March, 1834, and the consequent relation in which I stood to the majority of the Senate by whose vote it was adopted, I feel it to be my duty to say something on this expunging resolution, and I always have intended to do so when I should be persuaded that there existed a settled purpose of pressing it to a final decision. But it was so taken up and put down at the last session-taken up one day, when a speech was prepared for delivery, and put down when it was pronounced, that I really doubted whether there existted any serious intention of ever putting it to the vote. At the very close of the last session, it will be recollected that the resolution came up, and in several quarters of the Senate a disposition was manifested to come to a definitive decision. On that occasion, I offered to waive my right to address the Senate, and silently to vote upon the resolution; but it was again laid upon the table, and laid there forever, as the country supposed, and as I believed. It is however now revived; and sundry changes having taken place in the members of this body, it would seem that the present design is to bring the resolution to an absolute conclusion.

I have not risen to repeat at full length the argument by which the friends of the resolution of March, 1834, sustained it. That argument is before the world-was unanswered at the time,

and is unanswerable. And I here, in my place, in the presence of my country and my GoD, after the fullest consideration and deliberation of which my mind is capable, reassert my solemn conviction of the truth of every proposition contained in that resolution. But it is not my intention to commit such an infliction upon the Senate as that would be, of retracing the whole ground of argument formerly occupied, I desire to lay before it at this time, a brief and true state of the case. Before the fatal step is taken of giving to the expunging resolution the sanction of the American Senate, I wish, by presenting a faithful outline of the real questions involved in the resolution of 1834, to make a last, even if it is to be an ineffectual appeal to the sober judgments of senators. I begin by reasserting the truth of that resolution.

Our British ancestors understood perfectly well the immense importance of the money power in a representative government. It is the great lever by which the crown is touched, and made to conform its administration to the interests of the kingdom, and the will of the people. Deprive parliament of the power of freely granting or withholding supplies, and surrender to the king the purse of the nation, he instantly becomes an absolute monarch. Whatever may be the form of government, elective or hereditary, democratic or despotic, that person who commands the force of the nation, and at the same time has uncontrolled possession of the purse of the nation, has absolute power, whatever may be the official name by which he is called.

Our immediate ancestors, profiting by the lessons on civil liberty, which had been taught in the country from which we sprung, endeavored to encircle around the public purse, in the hands of Congress, every possible security against the intrusion of the executive. With this view, Congress alone is invested by the Constitution with the power to lay and collect the taxes. When collected, not a cent is to be drawn from the public treasury, but in virtue of an act of Congress. And among the first acts of this government, was the passage of a law establishing the treasury department, for the safe keeping and the legal and regular disbursement of the money so collected. By that act a Secretary of the Treasury is placed at the head of the department; and varying in respect from all the other departments, he is to report, not to the President, but directly to Congress, and is lia

ble to be called to give information in person before Congress. It is impossible to examine dispassionately that act, without coming to the conclusion that he is emphatically the agent of Congress in performing the duties assigned by the constitution of Congress. The act further provides that a treasurer shall be appointed to receive and keep the public money, and none can be drawn from his custody but under the authority of a law, and in virtue of a warrant drawn by the secretary of the treasury, countersigned by the comptroller, and recorded by the register. Only when such a warrant is presented can the treasurer lawfully pay one dollar from the public purse. Why was the concurrence of these four officers required in disbursements of the public money? Was it not for greater security? Was it not intended that each, exercising a separate and independent will, should be a check upon every other? Was it not the purpose of the law to con-sider each of these four officers, acting in his proper sphere, not as a mere automaton, but as an intellectual, intelligent, and responsible person, bound to observe the law, and to stop the warrant, or stop the money, if the authority of the law were wanting?

Thus stood the treasury from 1789 to 1816. During that long time no President had ever attempted to interfere with the custody of the public purse. It remained where the law placed it, undisturbed, and every chief magistrate, including the father of his country, respected the law.

In 1816 an act passed to establish the late Bank of the United States for the term of twenty years; and, by the 16th section of the act, it is enacted,

That the deposites of the money of the United States in places in which the said Bank and the branches thereof may be established, shall be made in said Bank or branches thereof, unless the Secretary of the Treasury shall at at any time otherwise order and direct; in which case the Secretary of the Treasury shall immediately lay before Congress if in session, and if not, immediately after the commencement of the next session, the reasons of such order or direction."

Thus it is perfectly manifest, from the express words of the law, that the power to make any order or direction for the removal of the public deposites, is confided to the Secretary alone, to the absolute exclusion of the President, and all the world besides. And the law, proceeding upon the established principle that the Secretary of the treasury, in all that concerns the public purse, acts as the direct agent of Congress, requires, in the event of his ordering or directing a re

moval of the deposites, that he shall immediately lay his reasons therefor before whom? the President? No: before Congress.

So stood the public treasury and the public deposites from the year 1816 to September, 1833. In all that period of seventeen years, running through or into four several administrations of the government, the law had its uninterrupted operation, no chief magistrate having assumed upon himself the power of diverting the public purse from its lawful custody, or of substituting his will to that of the officer to whose care it was exclusively entrusted.

In the session of Congress of 1832--'3, an inquiry had been instituted by the House of Representatives into the condition of the Bank of the United States. It resulted in a conviction of its entire safety, and a declaration by the House, made only a short time before the adjournment of Congress on the fourth of March 1833, that the public deposites were perfectly secure. This declaration was probably made in consequence of suspicions then afloat of a design on the part of the executive to remove the deposites. These suspicions were denied by the press friendly to the administration. Nevertheless, the members had scarcely reached their respective homes, before measures were commenced by the executive to effect a removal of the deposites from that very place of safety which it was among the last acts of the House to declare existed in the Bank of the United States.

In prosecution of this design, Mr. McLain, the Secretary of the Treasury, who was decidedly opposed to such a measure, was promoted to the Department of State, and Mr. Duane was appointed to succeed him. But Mr. Duane was equally convinced with his predecessor that he was forbidden by every consideration of duty to execute the power with which the law had entrusted the Secretary of the Treasury, and refused to remove the deposites; whereupon he was dismissed from office, a new Secretary of the Treasury was appointed, and, in September, 1833, by the command of the President, the measure was finally accomplished. That it was the President's act was never denied, but proclaimed, boasted, defended. It fell upon the country like a thunderbolt, agitating the Union from one extremity to the other. The stoutest adherents of the administration were alarmed, and all thinking men, not blinded by party pre