been predicted, and from whom so much good has come? Never has
any man entered upon the Chief Magistracy of a country under such
appalling predictions of ruin and woe! never has any one been so
pursued with direful prognostications! never has any one been so beset
and impeded by a powerful combination of political and moneyed
confederates! never has any one in any country where the
administration of justice has risen above the knife or the bowstring,
been so lawlessly and shamelessly tried and condemned by rivals and
enemies, without hearing, without defence, without the forms of law
and justice! History has been ransacked to find examples of tyrants
sufficiently odious to illustrate him by comparison.
Language has been tortured to find epithets sufficiently strong to paint
him in description. Imagination has been exhausted in her efforts to
deck him with revolting and inhuman attributes. Tyrant, despot,
usurper; destroyer of the liberties of his country; rash, ignorant,
imbecile; endangering the public peace with all foreign nations;
destroying domestic prosperity at home; ruining all industry, all
commerce, all manufactures; annihilating confidence between man
and man; delivering up the streets of populous cities to grass and
weeds, and the wharves of commercial towns to the encumbrance of
decaying vessels; depriving labor of all reward;
depriving industry of all employment; destroying the currency;
plunging an innocent and happy people from the summit of felicity
to the depths of misery, want, and despair. Such is the faint outline,
followed up by actual condemnation, of the appalling denunciations
daily uttered against this one MAN, from the moment he became an
object of political competition, down to the concluding moment of
his political existence.

The sacred voice of inspiration has told us that there is a time for