General Jackson’s administration may be denomiated the acme of American Glory, liberty and prosperity, for the National Debt, which in 1815, on account of the late War, was $125,000,000, and being lessened gradually, was paid up in his golden day: and preparations were made to distribute the surplus revenue among the several States: and that August Patriot, to use his own words in his farewell address, retired leaving “a great people prosperous and happy: in the full enjoyment of liberty and peace, honored and respected by every nation of the world”

At the age, then, of sixty years, our blooming began to decline under the withering touch of ! Disappointed ambition; thirst for power, pride, corruption, party spirit, faction, patronage; perquisites, fame, tangling alliances; , and spiritual wickedness in high places, struck hands, and reveled in midnight splendor. Trouble, vexation, perplexity and contention, mingled with hope, fear, and murmuring, rumbled through the and agitated the whole as would an Earthquake in the centre of the Earth, the world, heaving the Sea beyond its bounds and shaking the everlasting hills: So: in hopes of better times: while jealousy, hypocritical pretensions, and pompous ambition, were luxuriating upon the illgotten spoils of the people, they rose in their majesty like a tornado, and swept through the Land, till General [William Henry] Harrison appeared, as a Star among the Storm clouds, for better weather.

The Calm came: and the language of that venerable Patriot; in his inaugural address, while descanting upon the merits of the Constitution and its framers, thus expressed himself: “There were in it features which appeared not to be in harmony with their ideas of [p. 11]