affairs want attention,” he wrote to Brooke. “Nevertheless, I would make any personal sacrifice, if, by remaining here, I could do any good; but my belief is I can effect nothing, and perhaps my absence may remove an obstacle to something being done by others. I shall, therefore, go home in the spring.” His retirement from the Senate was, however, by no means to be an abandonment of public life; it was simply the withdrawal of a candidate for the presidency from a position beset with extraordinary difficulties. This resolution being fixed, his speeches in the Senate began to bear the character, not of efforts for the accomplishment of immediate results, but of admonitions for the future guidance of his followers.
He made a plea against the repeal of the bankrupt act, but in vain. That act was destined to be revoked by the same Congress which had made it. He then offered three amendments to the Constitution, all designed to reduce the authority of the Executive. One embodied his old proposition that the veto of the President — which, with singular infatuation, he called in a letter “that parent and fruitful source of all our ills” — should be subject to be overruled by a simple majority of all the members of each house of Congress. The second provided that the Secretary of the Treasury and the Treasurer of the United States should be appointed by Congress; and the third prohibited the appointment to office of any member of Congress during the term for which he was elected. These
