is at their throats, they pray for it." And yet again: "If the true spark of religious and civil liberty be kindled, it will burn. Human agency cannot extinguish it. Like the earth's central fire, it may be smothered for a time; the ocean may overwhelm it; mountains may press it down; but its inherent and unconquerable force will heave both the ocean and the land, and at some time or other, in some place or other, the volcano will break out, and flame up to heaven." It would be difficult to find in any European literature a similar embodiment of an elemental sentiment of humanity, in an image which is as elemental as the sentiment to which it gives vivid expression. And then with what majesty, with what energy, and with what simplicity, can he denounce a political transaction which, had it not attracted his ire, would hardly have survived in the memory of his countrymen! Thus, in his Protest against Mr. Benton's Expunging Resolution, speaking for himself and his Senatorial colleague, he says: "We rescue our own names, character, and honor from all participation in this matter; and, whatever the wayward character of the times, the headlong and plunging spirit of party devotion, or the fear or the love of power, may have been able to bring about elsewhere, we desire to thank God that they have not, as yet, overcome the love of liberty, fidelity to true republican principles, and a sacred regard for the Constitution in that State whose soil was drenched to a mire by the first and best blood of the Revolution." Perhaps the peculiar power of Webster in condemning a measure by a felicitous epithet, such as that he employs in describing "the plunging spirit of party devotion," was never more happily exercised. In that word "plunging," he intended to condense all his horror and hatred of a transaction which he supposed calculated to throw the true principles of constitutional government into a bottomless abyss of personal government, where right constitutional principles would cease to have existence, as well as cease to have authority. There is one passage in his oration at the completion of the Bunker Hill Monument, which may be quoted as an illustration of his power of compact statement, and which, at the same time, may save readers from the trouble of reading many excellent histories of the origin and progress of the Spanish dominion in America, condensing, as it does, all which such histories can tell us in a few smiting sentences. Spain," he says, "stooped on South America, like a vulture on its prey. Every thing was force. Territories were acquired by fire and sword. Cities were destroyed by fire and sword. Hundreds of thousands of human beings fell by fire and sword. Even conversion to 66 Christianity was attempted by fire and sword." One is reminded, in this passage, of Macaulay's method of giving vividness to his confident generalization of facts by emphatic repetitions of the same form of words. The repetition of "fire and sword," in this series of short, sharp sentences, ends in forcing the reality of what the words mean on the dullest imagination; and the climax is capped by affirming that "fire and sword" were the means by which the religion of peace was recommended to idolaters, whose heathenism was more benignant, and more intrinsically Christian, than the military Christianity which was forced upon them. - And then, again, how easily Webster's imagination slips in, at the end of a comparatively bald enumeration of the benefits of a good government, to vitalize the statements of his understanding! "Everywhere," he says, "there is order, everywhere there is security. Everywhere the law reaches to the highest, and reaches to the lowest, to protect all in their rights, and to restrain all from wrong; and over all hovers liberty, — that liberty for which our fathers fought and fell on this very spot, with her eye ever watchful, and her eagle wing ever wide outspread." There is something astonishing in the dignity given in the last clause of this sentence to the American eagle, a bird so degraded by the rhodomontade of fifth-rate declaimers, that it seemed impossible that the highest genius and patriotism could restore it to its primacy among the inhabitants of the air, and its just eminence as a symbol of American liberty. It is also to be noted, that Webster here alludes to "the bird of freedom" only as it appears on the American silver dollar that passes daily from hand to hand, where the watchful eye and the outspread wing are so inartistically represented that the critic is puzzled to account for the grandeur of the image which the orator contrived to evolve from the barbaric picture on the ugliest and clumsiest of civilized coins. The compactness of Webster's statements occasionally reminds us of the epigrammatic point which characterizes so many of the statements of Burke. Thus, in presenting a memorial to Congress, signed by many prominent men of business, against President Jackson's system of finance, he saw at once that the Democrats would denounce it as another manifesto of the "moneyed aristocracy." Accordingly Webster introduced the paper to the attention of the Senate, with the preliminary remark: "The memorialists are not unaware, that, if rights are attacked, attempts will be made to render odious those whose rights are violated. Power always seeks such subjects on which to try its experiments." It is difficult to resist the impression that Webster must have been indebted to Burke for this maxim. Again, we are deluded into the belief that we must be reading Burke, when Webster refers to the minimum principle as the right one to be followed in imposing duties on certain manufactures. "It lays the impost," he says, "exactly where it will do good, and leaves the rest free. It is an intelligent, discerning, discriminating principle; not a blind, headlong, generalizing, uncalculating operation. Simplicity, undoubtedly, is a great beauty in acts of legislation, as well as in the works of art; but in both it must be a simplicity resulting from congruity of parts and adaptation to the end designed; not a rude generalization, which either leaves the particular object unaccomplished, or, in accomplishing it, accomplishes a dozen others also, which were not desired. It is a simplicity wrought out by knowledge and skill; not the rough product of an undistinguishing, sweeping general principle." An ingenuous reader, who has not learned from his historical studies that men generally act, not from arguments addressed to their understandings, but from vehement appeals which rouse their passions to defend their seeming interests, cannot comprehend why Webster's arguments against Nullification and Secession, which were apparently unanswerable, and which were certainly unanswered either by Hayne or Calhoun, should not have settled the question in debate between the North and the South. Such a reader, after patiently following all the turns and twists of the logic, all the processes of the reasoning employed on both sides of the intellectual contest, would naturally conclude that the party defeated in the conflict would gracefully acknowledge the fact of its defeat; and, as human beings, gifted with the faculty of reason, would cheerfully admit the demonstrated results of its exercise. He would find it difficult to comprehend why the men who were overcome in a fair gladiatorial strife in the open arena of debate, with brain pitted against brain, and manhood against manhood, should resort to the rough logic of "blood and iron," when the nobler kind of logic, that which is developed in the struggle of mind with mind, had failed to accomplish the purposes which their hearts and wills, independent of their understandings, were bent on accomplishing. It may be considered certain that so wise a statesman as Webster a statesman whose foresight was so palpably the consequence of his insight, and whose piercing intellect was so admirably adapted to read events in their principles-never indulged in such illusions as those which cheered so many of his own adherents, when they supposed his triumph in argumentation was to settle a matter which was really based on organic differences in the institutions of the two sections of the Union. He knew perfectly well that, while the Webster men were glorying in his victory over Calhoun, the Calhoun men were equally jubilant in celebrating Calhoun's victory over him. Which of them had the better in the argument was of little importance in comparison with the terrible fact that the people of the Southern States were widening, year by year, the distance which separated them from the people of the Northern States. We have no means of judging whether Webster clearly foresaw the frightful civil war between the two sections, which followed so soon after his own death. We only know that, to him, it was a conflict constantly impending, and which could be averted for the time only by compromises, concessions, and other temporary expedients. If he allowed his mind to pass from the pressing questions of the hour, and to consider the radical division between the two sections of the country which were only formally united, it would seem that he must have felt, as long as the institution of negro slavery existed, that he was only laboring to postpone a conflict which it was impossible for him to prevent. But my present purpose is simply to indicate the felicity of Webster's intrepid assault on the principles which the Southern disunionists put forward in justification of their acts. Mr. Calhoun's favorite idea was this, that Nullification was a conservative principle, to be exercised within the Union, and in accordance with a just interpretation of the Constitution. "To begin with nullification," Webster retorted, "with the avowed intent, nevertheless, not to proceed to secession, dismemberment, and general revolution, is as if one were to take the plunge of Niagara, and cry out that he would stop halfway down. In the one case, as in the other, the rash adventurer must go to the bottom of the dark abyss below, were it not that the abyss has no discovered bottom." How admirable also is his exposure of the distinction attempted to be drawn between secession, as a State right to be exercised under the provisions of what was called "the Constitutional Compact," and revolution. "Secession," he says, "as a revolutionary right, is intelligible; as a right to be proclaimed in the midst of civil commotions, and asserted at the head of armies, I can understand it. But as a practical right, existing under the Constitution, and in conformity with its provisions, it seems to me nothing but a plain absurdity; for it supposes resistance to government, under the authority of government itself; it supposes dismemberment, without violating the principles of union; it supposes opposition to law, without crime; it supposes the total overthrow of government, without revolution." After putting some pertinent interrogatories—which are arguments in themselves relating to the inevitable results of secession, he adds, that "every man must see that these are all questions which can arise only after a revolution. They presuppose the breaking up of the government. While the Constitution lasts, they are repressed"; - and then, with that felicitous use of the imagination as a handmaid of the understanding, which is the peculiar characteristic of his eloquence, he closes the sentence by saying, that "they spring up to annoy and startle us only from its grave." A mere reasoner would have stopped at the word "repressed"; the instantaneous conversion of "questions" into spectres, affrighting and annoying us as they spring up from the grave of the Constitution, which is also by implication impersonated, is the work of Webster's ready imagination; and it thoroughly_vitalizes the statements which precede it. - A great test of the sincerity of a statesman's style is his moderation. Now, if we take the whole body of Mr. Webster's speeches, whether delivered in the Senate or before popular assemblies, during the period of his opposition to President Jackson's administration, we may well be surprised at their moderation of tone and statement. Everybody old enough to recollect the singular virulence of political speech at that period must remember it as disgraceful equally to the national conscience and the national understanding. The spirit of party, always sufficiently fierce and unreasonable, was then stimulated into a fury resembling madness. Almost every speaker, Democrat or Whig, was in that state of passion which is represented by the physical sign of "foaming at the mouth." Few mouths then opened that did not immediately begin to "foam." So many fortunes were suddenly wrecked by President Jackson's financial policy, and the business of the country was so disastrously disturbed, that, whether the policy was right or wrong, those who assailed and those who defended it seemed to be equally devoid of common intellectual honesty. "I do well to be angry," appears to have been the maxim which inspired Democratic and Whig orators alike; and what reason there was on either side was submerged in the lies and libels, in the calumnies and caricatures, in the defamations and execrations, which accompanied the citation of facts and the affirmation of principles. Webster, during all this time, was selected as a shining mark, at which every puny writer or speaker who opposed him hurled his small or large contribution of verbal rotten eggs; and yet Webster was almost the only Whig statesman |