I repeat, Sir, that, in adopting the sentiment of the framers of the Constitution, I read their language audibly, and word for word; and I pointed out the distinction, just as fully as I have now done, between the consolidation of the Union and that other obnoxious consolidation which I disclaimed.  And yet the honorable member misunderstood me.  The gentleman had said that he wished for no fixed revenue,—­not a shilling.  If by a word he could convert the Capitol into gold, he would not do it.  Why all this fear of revenue?  Why, Sir, because, as the gentleman told us, it tends to consolidation.  Now this can mean neither more nor less than that a common revenue is a common interest, and that all common interests tend to preserve the union of the States.  I confess I like that tendency; if the gentleman dislikes it, he is right in deprecating a shilling of fixed revenue.  So much, Sir, for consolidation.

As well as I recollect the course of his remarks, the honorable gentleman next recurred to the subject of the tariff.  He did not doubt the word must be of unpleasant sound to me, and proceeded, with an effort neither new nor attended with new success, to involve me and my votes in inconsistency and contradiction.  I am happy the honorable gentleman has furnished me an opportunity of a timely remark or two on that subject.  I was glad he approached it, for it is a question I enter upon without fear from anybody.  The strenuous toil of the gentleman has been to raise an inconsistency between my dissent to the tariff in 1824, and my vote in 1828.  It is labor lost.  He pays undeserved compliment to my speech in 1824; but this is to raise me high, that my fall, as he would have it, in 1828, may be more signal.  Sir, there was no fall.  Between the ground I stood on in 1824 and that I took in 1828, there was not only no precipice, but no declivity.  It was a change of position to meet new circumstances, but on the same level.  A plain tale explains the whole matter.  In 1816 I had not acquiesced in the tariff, then supported by South Carolina.  To some parts of it, especially, I felt and expressed great repugnance.  I held the same opinions in 1820, at the meeting in Faneuil Hall, to which the gentleman has alluded.  I said then, and say now, that, as an original question, the authority of Congress to exercise the revenue power, with direct reference to the protection of manufactures, is a questionable authority, far more questionable, in my judgment, than the power of internal improvements.  I must confess, Sir, that in one respect some impression has been made on my opinions lately.  Mr. Madison’s publication has put the power in a very strong light.  He has placed it, I must acknowledge, upon grounds of construction and argument which seem impregnable.  But even if the power were doubtful, on the face of the Constitution itself, it had been assumed and asserted in the first revenue law ever passed under that same Constitution and on this ground, as a matter settled