But, sir, the coalition! The coalition! Aye, “the murdered coalition!” The gentleman asks if I were led or frighted into this debate by the spectre of the coalition. “Was it the ghost of the murdered coalition,” he exclaims, “which haunted the member from Massachusetts, and which, like the ghost of Banquo, would never down?” “The murdered coalition!” Sir, this charge of a coalition, in reference to the late administration, is not original with the honorable member. It did not spring up in the Senate. Whether as a fact, as an argument, or as an embellishment, it is all borrowed. He adopts it, indeed, from a very low origin, and a still lower present condition. It is one of the thousand calumnies with which the press teemed during an excited political canvass. It was a charge of which there was not only no proof or probability, but which was, in itself, wholly impossible to be true. No man of common information ever believed a syllable of it. Yet it was of that class of falsehoods which, by continued repetition through all the organs of detraction and abuse, are capable of misleading those who are already far misled, and of further fanning passion already kindling into flame. Doubtless it served its day, and, in a greater or less degree, the end designed by it. Having done that, it has sunk into the general mass of stale and loathed calumnies. It is the very castoff slough of a polluted and shameless press. Incapable of further mischief, it lies in the sewer lifeless and despised. It is not now, sir, in the power of the honorable member to give it dignity or decency, by attempting to elevate it, and to introduce it into the Senate. He cannot change it from what it is—an object of general disgust and scorn. On the contrary, the contact, if he choose to touch it, is more likely to drag him down, down, to the place where it lies itself.
But, sir, the honorable member was not, for other reasons, entirely happy in his allusion to the story of Banquo’s murder and Banquo’s ghost. It was not, I think, the friends, but the enemies of the murdered Banquo, at whose bidding his spirit would not down. The honorable gentleman is fresh in his reading of the English classics, and can put me right if I am wrong; but according to my poor recollection, it was at those who had begun with caresses, and ended with foul and treacherous murder, that the gory locks were shaken. The ghost of Banquo, like that of Hamlet, was an honest ghost. It disturbed no innocent man. It knew where its appearance would strike terror, and who would cry out. A ghost! It made itself visible in the right quarter, and compelled the guilty, and the conscience-smitten, and none others, to start, with,
“Prithee, see there! behold!—look! lo!
If I stand here, I saw him!”
Their eyeballs were seared—was it not so, sir?—who had thought to shield themselves by concealing their own hand and laying the imputation of the crime on a low and hireling agency in wickedness; who had vainly attempted to stifle the workings of their own coward consciences, by circulating, through white lips and chattering teeth, “Thou canst not say I did it!” I have misread the great poet, if it was those who had no way partaken in the deed of the death, who either found that they were, or feared that they should be, pushed from their stools by the ghost of the slain, or who cried out to a spectre created by their own fears, and their own remorse, “Avaunt! and quit our sight!”
There is another particular, sir, in which the honorable member’s quick perception of resemblances might, I should think, have seen something in the story of Banquo, making it not altogether a subject of the most pleasant contemplation. Those who murdered Banquo, what did they win by it? Substantial good? Permanent power? Or disappointment, rather, and sore mortification—dust and ashes—the common fate of vaulting ambition overleaping itself? Did not even-handed justice, ere long, commend the poisoned chalice to their own lips? Did they not soon find that for another they had “filed their mind?” that their ambition though apparently for the moment successful, had but put a barren sceptre in their grasp? Aye, sir,—
“A barren sceptre in their gripe,
Thence to be wrenched by an unlineal hand,
No son of theirs succeeding.”
Sir, I need pursue the allusion no further. I leave the honorable gentleman to run it out at his leisure, and to derive from it all the gratification it is calculated to administer. If he finds himself pleased with the associations, and prepared to be quite satisfied, though the parallel should be entirely completed, I had almost said I am satisfied also—but that I shall think of. Yes, sir, I will think of that.