the errors of the new administration; but it seems to me that it would acquire greater force by availing itself also of that fatal error in its origin, which resulted from the President elect being the designated successor of the present incumbent. If a President may name his successor and bring the whole machinery of the government, including its one hundred thousand dependents, into the canvass, and if by such means he achieves a victory, such a fatal precedent as this must be rebuked and reversed, or there is an end of the freedom of election. Now I think that no wisdom or benefit, in the measures of the new administration, can compensate or atone for this vice in its origin.” This evidently meant systematic opposition, just that kind of opposition which had been waged by the Jackson party against the administration of John Quincy Adams, also on account of its origin, which Clay had then considered extremely unjust.
The subject of the next presidential election, too, was already looming up. Van Buren had hardly slept a night in the White House when Clay's friends in New York held a meeting to consider the means by which Clay's election in 1840 could be secured. The proceedings of that meeting having been communicated to him, Clay wrote in August, 1837, as a reply, one of those stilted letters in which candidates for the presidency, made restless not only by their own ambition, but also by the importunate zeal of their “friends,” vainly try to conceal the miseries of their existence. It was too early yet, he
