He had looked upon the secretaryship of state as the stepping-stone to the presidency before; he probably continued to do so. The presidential fever is a merciless disease. It renders its victims blind and deaf. So now Clay misjudged the situation altogether. “An opposition is talked of here,” he wrote to Brooke; “but I regard that as the ebullition of the moment. There are elements for faction, none for opposition. Opposition to what? To measures and principles which are yet to be developed!” He believed the new administration would be judged on its merits. He did not know the spirit it was to meet. When he declared himself resolved to accept the secretaryship of state, six days after the offer had been made, he was very far from having counted the cost.
Immediately before the final adjournment of the Eighteenth Congress, on March 3, 1825, the House of Representatives passed a resolution thanking “the Honorable Henry Clay for the able, impartial, and dignified manner in which he had presided over its deliberations,” etc. In response, “retiring, perhaps forever,” from the office of Speaker, Clay was able to say that, in the fourteen years during which he had, with short intervals, occupied that difficult and responsible position, not one of his decisions had ever been reversed by the House. Indeed, Henry Clay stands in the traditions of the House of Representatives as the greatest of its Speakers. His perfect mastery of parliamentary law, his quickness of decision in applying it, his
