1511. CONGRESS, Compensation of Members.—
You you did not understand to what proceeding of Congress I alluded as
likely to produce a removal of most of the
members, and that by a spontaneous movement
of the people, unsuggested by the newspapers,
which had been silent on it. I alluded
to the law giving themselves $1500 a
year. There has never been an instant before
of so unanimous an opinion of the people,
and that through every State in the Union.
A very few members of the first order of
merit in the House will be reelected; Clay, of
Kentucky, by a small majority, and a few
others. But the almost entire mass will go
out, not only those who supported the law or
voted for it, or skulked from the vote, but
those who voted against it or opposed it actively,
if they took the money; and the examples
of refusals to take it were very few.—
To Albert Gallatin.
Ford ed., x, 63.
(M.
Sep. 1816)
