law of necessity. What does this tariff promise? Where will the profit
rest? Where will the loss fall crushingly? The slow torture of which we
read in histories of early times was like to this. Each day a weight was
added to that already lying on the breast of a strong man, bound on his
back by the cords of his oppressors, until relief and destruction came
together, and the man was crushed; such was the _peine forte et dure_."

"Calhoun is patriarchal,[4] and is now placing all his individual
strength to the task of heaving off this incubus from the breast of our
body politic, but with small avail, for he has no lever to assist
him--no fulcrum whereon to rest it; otherwise he might say with
Archimedes, 'With these I could move a world.' He is unaided, this
eagled-eyed prophet of ours, looking sorrowfully, sagaciously down into
the ages! South Carolina is the Joseph, that his cruel brothers, the
remaining Southern States, have sold to the Egyptians, as a bond-slave.
But they shall yet come to drink of his cup, and eat of his bread of
opinion, in the famine of their Canaan. Nullification shall leave a
fitting successor, as Philip of Macedon left Alexander to carry out his
plans. The abolitionist and the slave-holder are as distinct as were
Charles I. and Cromwell, or Catharine de Medicis and Henry of Navarre.
The germ that Calhoun has planted shall lie long in the earth, perhaps,
but when it breaks the surface, it shall grow in one night to maturity,
like that in your so famous 'Mother Goose' story of 'Jack and his
Bean-stalk,' forming a ladder wherewith to scale the abode of giants and
slay them in their drunken sleep of security. But he who does this deed,
this Joshua of the Lord's, this fierce successor of our gentle Moses,
shall wade through his oceans of blood to gain the stone. God
knoweth--He only--how all this shall end, whether in success or
overthrow. It is so far wrapped in mystery."