American of American missions, that to the Panama Congress. It was Gallatin whom he had sent to England after the retirement of Rufus King, to protect American interests amid uncommonly tangled circumstances. But now, suddenly, the same American statesman, not present and unable to answer, was denounced by him in the Senate as one who had “no feelings, no sympathies, no principles, in common with our people,” as “an alien at heart,” who should “go home to Europe;” and all this because Clay found it troublesome to answer Gallatin's arguments on the tariff.
Gallatin, during his long career, had much to suffer on account of his foreign birth. The same persons who had praised him as a great statesman and a profound thinker, when he happened to agree with their views and to serve their purposes, had not unfrequently, so soon as he expressed opinions they disliked, denounced him as an impertinent foreigner who should “go home.” He was accustomed to such treatment from small politicians. But to see one of the great men of the Republic, and an old friend too, descend so far, could not fail to pain the septuagenarian deeply.
But the irony of fate furnished a biting commentary on Clay's conduct. Scarcely a year after he had so fiercely denounced Gallatin as “an alien at heart” for having recommended a gradual reduction of tariff duties to a level of about twenty-five per cent, Clay himself, as we shall see, proposed and carried a gradual reduction of duties to
