"I endeavored to combat his objections to a Bankrupt Bill subsequently, but, of course, without any success: he felt as a planter, and was very jealous of the influence of merchants as legislators."
There are flashes of sense and touches of pathos in some of his most tory passages. As he was delivering in the House one of his emphatic predictions of the certain failure of our experiment of freedom on this continent, he broke into an apology for so doing, that brought tears to many eyes. "It is an infirmity of my nature," said he,
"to have an obstinate constitutional preference of the true over the agreeable; and I am satisfied, that, if I had had an only son, or what is dearer, an only daughter,—which God forbid!—I say, God forbid, for she might bring her father's gray hairs with sorrow to the grave; she might break my heart, or worse than that—what? Can anything be worse than that? Yes, sir, I might break hers!"
His fable, too, of the caterpillar and the horseman was conceived in arrogance, but it was pretty and effective. Every tory intellect on earth is pleased to discourse in that way of the labors of the only men who greatly help their species,—the patient elaborators of truth. A caterpillar, as we learn from this fable, had crawled slowly over a fence, which a gallant horseman took at a single leap. "Stop," says the caterpillar,
"you are too flighty; you want connection and continuity; it took me an hour to get over; you can't be as sure as I am that you have really overcome the difficulty, and are indeed over the fence."
To which, of course, the gallant horseman makes the expected contemptuous reply. This is precisely in the spirit of Carlyle's sneers at the political economists,—the men who are not content to sit down and howl in this wilderness of a modern world, but bestir themselves to discover methods by which it can be made less a wilderness.
There is so much truth in the doctrines of the original States' Rights party,—the party of Jefferson, Madison, and Patrick Henry,—that a very commonplace man, who learned his politics in that school, is able to make a respectable figure in the public counsels. The mere notion that government, being a necessary evil, is to be reduced to the minimum that will answer the purposes of government, saves from many false steps. The doctrine that the central government is to confine itself to the duties assigned it in the Constitution, is a guiding principle suited to the limited human mind. A vast number of claims, suggestions, and petitions are excluded by it even from consideration. If an eloquent Hamiltonian proposes to appropriate the public money for the purpose of enabling American manufacturers to exhibit their products at a Paris Exhibition, the plainest country member of the Jeffersonian school perceives at once the inconsistency of such a proposition with the fundamental principle of his political creed. He has a compass to steer by, and a port to sail to, instead of being afloat on the waste of waters, the sport of every breeze that blows. It is touching to observe that this unhappy, sick, and sometimes mad John Randolph, amid all the vagaries of his later life, had always a vein of soundness in him, derived from his early connection with the enlightened men who acted in politics with Thomas Jefferson. The phrase "masterly inactivity" is Randolph's; and it is something only to have given convenient expression to a system of conduct so often wise. He used to say that Congress could scarcely do too little. His ideal of a session was one in which members should make speeches till every man had fully expressed and perfectly relieved his mind, then pass the appropriation bills, and go home. And we ought not to forgot that, when President John Quincy Adams brought forward his schemes for covering the continent with magnificent works at the expense of the treasury of the United States, and of uniting the republics of both Americas into a kind of holy alliance, it was Randolph's piercing sarcasm which, more than anything else, made plain to new members the fallacy, the peril, of such a system. His opposition to this wild federalism involved his support of Andrew Jackson; but there was no other choice open to him.
Seldom did he display in Congress so much audacity and ingenuity as in defending General Jackson while he was a candidate for the Presidency against Mr. Adams. The two objections oftenest urged against Jackson were that he was a military chieftain, and that he could not spell. Mr. Randolph discoursed on these two points in a most amusing manner, displaying all the impudence and ignorance of the tory, inextricably mingled with the good sense and wit of the man. "General Jackson cannot write," said a friend. "Granted," replied he. "General Jackson cannot write because he was never taught; but his competitor cannot write because he was not teachable." He made a bold remark in one of his Jacksonian harangues. "The talent which enables a man to write a book or make a speech has no more relation to the leading of an army or a senate, than it has to the dressing of a dinner." He pronounced a fine eulogium on the Duke of Marlborough, one of the worst spellers in Europe, and then asked if gentlemen would have had that illustrious man "superseded by a Scotch schoolmaster." It was in the same ludicrous harangue that he uttered his famous joke upon those schools in which young ladies were said to be "finished." "Yes," he exclaimed, "finished indeed; finished for all the duties of a wife, or mother, or mistress of a family." Again he said:
"There is much which it becomes a second-rate man to know, which a first-rate man ought to be ashamed to know. No head was ever clear and sound that was stuffed with book-learning. My friend, W.R. Johnson, has many a groom that can clean and dress a racehorse, and ride him too, better than he can."
He made the sweeping assertion, that no man had ever presided over a government with advantage to the country governed, who had not in him the making of a good general; for, said he, "the talent for government lies in these two things,—sagacity to perceive, and decision to act." Really, when we read this ingenious apology for, or rather eulogy of, ignorance, we cease to wonder that General Jackson should have sent him to Russia.