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 you. Clay and