I go to other remarks of the honorable member; and I have to complain of an entire misapprehension of what I said on the subject of the national debt, though I can hardly perceive how any one could misunderstand me.  What I said was, not that I wished to put off the payment of the debt, but, on the contrary, that I had always voted for every measure for its reduction, as uniformly as the gentleman himself.  He seems to claim the exclusive merit of a disposition to reduce the public charge.  I do not allow it to him.  As a debt, I was, I am for paying it, because it is a charge on our finances, and on the industry of the country.  But I observed, that I thought I perceived a morbid fervor on that subject, an excessive anxiety to pay off the debt, not so much because it is a debt simply, as because, while it lasts, it furnishes one objection to disunion.  It is, while it continues, a tie of common interest.  I did not impute such motives to the honorable member himself, but that there is such a feeling in existence I have not a particle of doubt.  The most I said was, that, if one effect of the debt was to strengthen our Union, that effect itself was not regretted by me, however much others might regret it.  The gentleman has not seen how to reply to this, otherwise than by supposing me to have advanced the doctrine that a national debt is a national blessing.  Others, I must hope, will find much less difficulty in understanding me.  I distinctly and pointedly cautioned the honorable member not to understand me as expressing an opinion favorable to the continuance of the debt.  I repeated this caution, and repeated it more than once; but it was thrown away.

On yet another point, I was still more unaccountably misunderstood.  The gentleman had harangued against “consolidation.”  I told him, in reply, that there was one kind of consolidation to which I was attached, and that was the consolidation of our Union; that this was precisely that consolidation to which I feared others were not attached, and that such consolidation was the very end of the Constitution, the leading object, as they had informed us themselves, which its framers had kept in view.  I turned to their communication,[5] and read their very words, “the consolidation of the Union,” and expressed my devotion to this sort of consolidation.  I said, in terms, that I wished not in the slightest degree to augment the powers of this government; that my object was to preserve, not to enlarge; and that by consolidating the Union I understood no more than the strengthening of the Union, and perpetuating it.  Having been thus explicit, having thus read from the printed book the precise words which I adopted, as expressing my own sentiments, it passes comprehension how any man could understand me as contending for an extension of the powers of the government, or for consolidation in that odious sense in which it means an accumulation, in the federal government, of the powers properly belonging to the States.