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 half-way 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 who preserved sanity of understanding during the whole progress of that political riot, in which the passions of men became the masters of their understandings. Pious Whig fathers, who worshipped the "godlike Daniel," went almost to the extent of teaching their children to curse Jackson in their prayers; equally pious Democratic fathers brought up their sons and daughters to anathematize the fiend-like Daniel as the enemy of human rights; and yet, in reading Webster's speeches, covering the whole space between 1832 and 1836, we can hardly find a statement which an historian of our day would not admit as a candid generalization of facts, or an argument which would not stand the test of logical examination. Such an historian might entirely disagree with the opinions of Webster; but he would certainly award to him the praise of being an honest reasoner and an honest rhetorician, in a time when reason was used merely as a tool of party passion, and when rhetoric rushed madly into the worst excesses of rhodomontade.
It is also to be said that Webster rarely indulged in personalities. When we consider how great were his powers of sarcasm and invective, how constant were the provocations to exercise them furnished by his political enemies, and how atrociously and meanly allusions to his private affairs were brought into discussions which should have been confined to refuting his reasoning, his moderation in this matter is to be ranked as a great virtue. He could not take a glass of wine without the trivial fact being announced all over the country as indisputable proof that he was an habitual drunkard, though the most remarkable characteristic of his speeches is their temperance,—their "total abstinence" from all the intoxicating moral and mental "drinks" which confuse the understanding and mislead the conscience. He could not borrow money on his note of hand, like any other citizen, without the circumstance being trumpeted abroad as incontrovertible evidence that Nick Biddle had paid him that sum to defend his diabolical Bank in the Senate of the United States. The plain fact that his speeches were confined strictly to the exposition and defence of sound opinions on trade and finance, and that it was difficult to answer them, only confirmed his opponents in the conviction that old Nick was at the bottom of it all. His great intellect was admitted; but on the high, broad brow, which was its manifestation to the eye, his enemies pasted the words, "To be let," or, "For sale." The more impersonal he became in his statements and arguments, the more truculently was he assailed by the personalities of the political gossip and scandal-monger. Indeed, from the time he first came to the front as a great lawyer, statesman, and patriot, he was fixed upon by the whole crew of party libellers as a man whose arguments could be answered most efficiently by staining his character. He passed through life with his head enveloped "in a cloud of poisonous flies"; and the head was the grandest-looking head that had ever been seen on the American continent. It was so pre-eminently noble and impressive, and promised so much more than it could possibly perform, that only one felicitous sarcasm of party malice, among many thousands of bad jokes, has escaped oblivion; and that was stolen from Charles Fox's remark on Lord Chancellor Thurlow, as Fox once viewed him sitting on the wool-sack, frowning on the English House of Lords, which he dominated by the terror of his countenance, and by the fear that he might, at any moment, burst forth in one of his short bullying, thundering retorts, should any comparatively weak baron, earl, marquis, or duke dare to oppose him. "Thurlow," said Fox, "must be an impostor, for nobody can be as wise as he looks." The American version of this was, "Webster must be a charlatan, for no one can be as great as he looks."
But during all the time that his antagonists attempted to elude the force of his arguments by hunting up the evidences of his debts, and by trying to show that the most considerate, the most accurate, and the most temperate of his lucid statements were the products of physical stimulants, Webster steadily kept in haughty reserve his power of retaliation. In his speech in reply to Hayne he hinted that, if he were imperatively called upon to meet blows with blows, he might be found fully equal to his antagonists in that ignoble province of intellectual pugilism; but that he preferred the more civilized struggle of brain with brain, in a contest which was to decide questions of principle. In the Senate, where he could meet his political opponents face to face, few dared to venture to degrade the subject in debate from the discussion of principles to the miserable subterfuge of imputing bad motives as a sufficient answer to good arguments; but still many of these dignified gentlemen smiled approval on the efforts of the low-minded, small-minded caucus-speakers of their party, when they declared that Webster's logic was unworthy of consideration, because he was bought by the Bank, or bought by the manufacturers of Massachusetts, or bought by some other combination of persons who were supposed to be the deadly enemies of the laboring men of the country. On some rare occasions Webster's wrath broke out in such smiting words that his adversaries were cowed into silence, and cursed the infatuation which had led them to overlook the fact that the "logic-machine" had in it invectives more terrible than its reasonings. But generally he refrained from using the giant's power "like a giant"; and it is almost pathetic to remember that, when Mr. Everett undertook to edit, in 1851, the standard edition of his works, Webster gave directions to expunge all personalities from his speeches, even when those personalities were the just punishment of unprovoked attacks on his integrity as a man. Readers will look in vain, in this edition of his works, for some of the most pungent passages which originally attracted their attention in the first report of the Defence of the Treaty of Washington. At the time these directions were given, Webster was himself the object of innumerable personalities, which were the natural, the inevitable results of his speech of the 7th of March, 1850.
It seems to be a law, that the fame of all public men shall be "half disfame." We are specially warned to beware of the man of whom all men speak well. Burke, complimenting his friend Fox for risking every thing, even his "darling popularity," on the success of the East India Bill, nobly says: "He is traduced and abused for his supposed motives. He will remember, that obloquy is a necessary ingredient in all true glory; he will remember, that it was not only in the Roman customs, but it is in the nature of human things, that calumny and abuse are essential parts of triumph."
It may be said, however, that Webster's virtue in this general abstinence from personalities is to be offset by the fact that he could throw into a glance of his eye, a contortion of his face, a tone of his voice, or a simple gesture of his hand, more scorn, contempt, and hatred than ordinary debaters could express by the profuse use of all the scurrilous terms in the English language. Probably many a sentence, which we now read with an even pulse, was, as originally delivered, accompanied by such pointing of the finger, or such flashing of the eye, or such raising of the voice, that the seemingly innocent words were poisoned arrows that festered in the souls of those against whom they were directed, and made deadly enemies of a number of persons whom he seems, in his printed speeches, never to have mentioned without the respect due from one Senator to another. In his speech in defence of the Treaty of Washington, he had to repel Mr. Ingersoll's indecent attack on his integrity, and his dreadful retort is described by those who heard it as coming within the rules which condemn cruelty to animals. But the "noble rage" which prompted him to indulge in such unwonted invective subsided with the occasion that called it forth, and he was careful to have it expunged when the speech was reprinted. An eminent judge of the Supreme Court of Massachusetts, in commending the general dignity and courtesy which characterized Webster's conduct of a case in a court of law, noted one exception. "When," he said, "the opposite counsel had got him into a corner, the way he 'trampled out' was something frightful to behold. The court itself could hardly restrain him in his gigantic efforts to extricate himself from the consequences of a blunder or an oversight."
Great writers and orators are commonly economists in the use of words. They compel common words to bear a burden of thought and emotion, which mere rhetoricians, with all the resources of the language at their disposal, would never dream of imposing upon them. But it is also to be observed, that some writers have the power of giving a new and special significance to a common word, by impressing on it a wealth of meaning which it cannot claim for itself. Three obvious examples of this peculiar power may be cited. Among poets, Chaucer infused into the simple word "green" a poetic ecstasy which no succeeding English poet, not even Wordsworth, has ever rivalled, in describing an English landscape in the month of May. Jonathan Edwards fixed upon the term "sweetness" as best conveying his loftiest conception of the bliss which the soul of the saint can attain to on earth, or expect to be blessed with in heaven; but not one of his theological successors has ever caught the secret of using "sweetness" in the sense attached to it by him. Dr. Barrow gave to the word "rest," as embodying his idea of the spiritual repose of the soul fit for heaven, a significance which it bears in the works of no other great English divine. To descend a little, Webster was fond of certain words, commonplace enough in themselves, to which he insisted on imparting a more than ordinary import. Two of these, which meet us continually in reading his speeches, are "interesting" and "respectable." The first of these appears to him competent to express that rapture of attention called forth by a thing, an event, or a person, which other writers convey by such a term as "absorbing," or its numerous equivalents. If we should select one passage from his works which, more than any other, indicates his power of seeing and feeling, through a process of purely imaginative vision and sympathy, it is that portion of his Plymouth oration, where he places himself and his audience as spectators on the barren shore, when theMayflowercame into view. He speaks of "theinterestinggroup upon the deck" of the little vessel. The very word suggests that we are to have a very commonplace account of the landing, and the circumstances which followed it. In an instant, however, we are made to "feel the cold which benumbed, and listen to the winds which pierced" this "interesting" group; and immediately after, the picture is flashed upon the imagination of "chilled and shivering childhood, houseless, but for a mother's arms, couchless, but for a mother's breast,"—an image which shows that the orator had not only transported himself into a spectator of the scene, but had felt his own blood "almost freeze" in intense sympathy with the physical sufferings of the shelterless mothers and children.
There is no word which the novelists, satirists, philanthropic reformers, and Bohemians of our day have done so much to discredit, and make dis-respectable to the heart and the imagination, as the word "respectable." Webster always uses it as a term of eulogy. A respectable man is, to his mind, a person who performs all his duties to his family, his country, and his God; a person who is not only virtuous, but who has a clear perception of the relation which connects one virtue with another by "the golden thread" of moderation, and who, whether he be a man of genius, or a business man of average talent, or an intelligent mechanic, or a farmer of sound moral and mental character, is to be considered "respectable" because he is one of those citizens whose intelligence and integrity constitute the foundation on which the Republic rests. As late as 1843, in his noble oration on the completion of the Bunker Hill Monument, he declared that if our American institutions had done nothing more than to produce the character of Washington, that alone would entitle them to the respect of mankind. "Washington is all our own!… I would cheerfully put the question to-day to the intelligence of Europe and the world, what character of the century, upon the whole, stands out in the relief of history, most pure, mostrespectable, most sublime; and I doubt not, that, by a suffrage approaching to unanimity, the answer would be Washington!" It is needless to quote other instances of the peculiar meaning he put into the word "respectable," when we thus find him challenging the Europe of the eighteenth century to name a match for Washington, and placing "most respectable" after "most pure," and immediately preceding "most sublime," in his enumeration of the three qualities in which Washington surpassed all men of his century.
It has been often remarked that Webster adapted his style, even his habits of mind and modes of reasoning, to the particular auditors he desired to influence; but that, whether he addressed an unorganized crowd of people, or a jury, or a bench of judges, or the Senate of the United States, he ever proved himself an orator of the first class.
His admirers commonly confine themselves to the admirable sagacity with which he discriminated between the kind of reasoning proper to be employed when he addressed courts and juries, and the kind of reasoning which is most effective in a legislative assembly. The lawyer and the statesman were, in Webster, kept distinct, except so far as he was a lawyer who had argued before the Supreme Court questions of constitutional law. An amusing instance of this abnegation of the lawyer, while incidentally bringing in a lawyer's knowledge of judicial decisions, occurs in a little episode in his debate with Mr. Calhoun, in 1849, as to the relation of Congress to the Territories. Mr. Calhoun said that he had been told that the Supreme Court of the United States had decided, inonecase, that the Constitution did not extend to the Territories, but that he was "incredulous of the fact." "Oh!" replied Mr. Webster, "I can remove the gentleman's incredulity very easily, for I can assure him that the same thing has been decided by the United States courts over and over again for the last thirty years." It will be observed, however, that Mr. Webster, after communicating this important item of information, proceeded to discuss the question as if the Supreme Court had no existence, and bases his argument on the plain terms of the Constitution, and the plain facts recorded in the history of the government established by it.
Macaulay, in his lively way, has shown the difficulty of manufacturing English statesmen out of English lawyers, though, as lawyers, their rank in the profession may be very high. "Their arguments," he says, "are intellectual prodigies, abounding with the happiest analogies and the most refined distinctions. The principles of their arbitrary science being once admitted, the statute-books and the reports being once assumed as the foundations of reasoning, these men must be allowed to be perfect masters of logic. But if a question arises as to the postulates on which their whole system rests, if they are called upon to vindicate the fundamental maxims of that system which they have passed their lives in studying, these very men often talk the language of savages or of children. Those who have listened to a man of this class in his own court, and who have witnessed the skill with which he analyzes and digests a vast mass of evidence, or reconciles a crowd of precedents which at first sight seem contradictory, scarcely know him again when, a few hours later, they hear him speaking on the other side of Westminster Hall in his capacity of legislator. They can scarcely believe that the paltry quirks which are faintly heard through a storm of coughing, and which do not impose on the plainest country gentleman, can proceed from the same sharp and vigorous intellect which had excited their admiration under the same roof, and on the same day." And to this keen distinction between an English lawyer, and an English lawyer as a member of the House of Commons, may be added the peculiar kind of sturdy manliness which is demanded in any person who aims to take a leading part in Parliamentary debates. Erskine, probably the greatest advocate who ever appeared in the English courts of law, made but a comparatively poor figure in the House of Commons, as a member of the Whig opposition. "The truth is, Erskine," Sheridan once said to him, "you are afraid of Pitt, and that is the flabby part of your character."
But Macaulay, in another article, makes a point against the leaders of party themselves. His definition of Parliamentary government is "government by speaking"; and he declares that the most effective speakers are commonly ill-informed, shallow in thought, devoid of large ideas of legislation, hazarding the loosest speculations with the utmost intellectual impudence, and depending for success on volubility of speech, rather than on accuracy of knowledge or penetration of intelligence. "The tendency of institutions like those of England," he adds, "is to encourage readiness in public men, at the expense both of fulness and of exactness. The keenest and most vigorous minds of every generation, minds often admirably fitted for the investigation of truth, are habitually employed in producing arguments such as no man of sense would ever put into a treatise intended for publication, arguments which are just good enough to be used once, when aided by fluent delivery and pointed language." And he despairingly closes with the remark, that he "would sooner expect a great original work on political science, such a work, for example, as the Wealth of Nations, from an apothecary in a country town, or from a minister in the Hebrides, than from a statesman who, ever since he was one-and-twenty, had been a distinguished debater in the House of Commons."
Now it is plain that neither of these contemptuous judgments applies to Webster. He was a great lawyer; but as a legislator the precedents of the lawyer did not control the action or supersede the principles of the statesman. He was one of the most formidable debaters that ever appeared in a legislative assembly; and yet those who most resolutely grappled with him in the duel of debate would be the last to impute to him inaccuracy of knowledge or shallowness of thought. He carried into the Senate of the United States a trained mind, disciplined by the sternest culture of his faculties, disdaining any plaudits which were not the honest reward of robust reasoning on generalized facts, and "gravitating" in the direction of truth, whether he hit or missed it. In his case, at least, there was nothing in his legal experience, or in his legislative experience, which would have unfitted him for producing a work on the science of politics. The best speeches in the House of Commons of Lord Palmerston and Lord John Russell appear very weak indeed, as compared with the Reply to Hayne, or the speech on "The Constitution not a Compact between Sovereign States," or the speech on the President's Protest.
In this connection it may be said, when we remember the hot contests between the two men, that there is something plaintive in Calhoun's dying testimony to Webster's austere intellectual conscientiousness. Mr. Venables, who attended the South Carolina statesman in his dying hours, wrote to Webster: "When your name was mentioned he remarked that 'Mr. Webster has as high a standard of truth as any statesman I have met in debate. Convince him, and he cannot reply; he is silenced; he cannot look truth in the face and oppose it by argument. I think that it can be readily perceived by his manner when he felt the unanswerable force of a reply.' He often spoke of you in my presence, and always kindly and most respectfully." Now it must be considered that, in debate, the minds of Webster and Calhoun had come into actual contact and collision. Each really felt the force of the other. An ordinary duel might be ranked among idle pastimes when compared with the stress and strain and pain of their encounters in the duel of debate. A sword-cut or pistol-bullet, maiming the body, was as nothing in comparison with the wounds they mutually inflicted on that substance which was immortal in both. It was a duel, or series of duels, in which mind was opposed to mind, and will to will, and where the object appeared to be to inflict moral and mental annihilation on one of the combatants. There never passed a word between them on which the most ingenious Southern jurists, in their interpretations of the "code" of honor, could have found matter for a personal quarrel; and yet these two proud and strong personalities knew that they were engaged in a mortal contest, in which neither gave quarter nor expected quarter. Mr. Calhoun's intellectual egotism was as great as his intellectual ability. He always supposed that he was the victor in every close logical wrestle with any mind to which his own was opposed. He never wrestled with a mind, until he met Webster's, which in tenacity, grasp, and power was a match for his own. He, of course, thought his antagonist was beaten by his superior strength and amplitude of argumentation; but it is still to be noted that he, the most redoubtable opponent that Webster ever encountered, testified, though in equivocal terms, to Webster's intellectual honesty. When he crept, half dead, into the Senate-Chamber to hear Webster's speech of the 7th of March, 1850, he objected emphatically at the end to Webster's declaration that the Union could not be dissolved. After declaring that Calhoun's supposed case of justifiable resistance came within the definition of the ultimate right of revolution, which is lodged in all oppressed communities, Webster added that he did not at that time wish to go into a discussion of the nature of the United States government. "The honorable gentleman and myself," he said, "have broken lances sufficiently often before on that subject." "I have no desire to do it now," replied Calhoun; and Webster blandly retorted, "I presume the gentleman has not, and I have quite as little." One is reminded here of Dr. Johnson's remark, when he was stretched on a sick-bed, with his gladiatorial powers of argument suspended by physical exhaustion. "If that fellow Burke were now present," the Doctor humorously murmured, "he would certainly kill me."
But to Webster's eminence as a lawyer and a statesman, it is proper to add, that he has never been excelled as a writer of state papers among the public men of the United States. Mr. Emerson has a phrase which is exactly applicable to these efforts of Webster's mind. That phrase is, "superb propriety." Throughout his despatches, he always seems to feel that he impersonates his country; and the gravity and weight of his style are as admirable as its simplicity and majestic ease. "Daniel Webster, his mark," is indelibly stamped on them all. When the Treaty of Washington was criticised by the Whigs in the English Parliament, Macaulay specially noticed the difference in the style of the two negotiators. Lord Ashburton, he said, had compromised the honor of his country by "the humble, caressing, wheedling tone" of his letters, a tone which contrasted strangely with "the firm, resolute, vigilant, and unyielding manner" of the American Secretary of State. It is to be noticed that no other opponent of Sir Robert Peel's administration, not even Lord Palmerston and Lord John Russell, struck at the essential weakness of Lord Ashburton's despatches with the force and sagacity which characterized Macaulay's assault on the treaty. Indeed, a rhetorician and critic less skilful than Macaulay can easily detect that "America" is represented fully in Webster's despatches, while "Britannia" has a very amiable, but not very forcible, representative in Lord Ashburton. Had Palmerston been the British plenipotentiary, we can easily imagine how different would have been the task imposed on Webster. As the American Secretary was generally in the right in every position he assumed, he would probably have triumphed even over Palmerston; but the letters of the "pluckiest" of English statesmen would, we may be sure, have never been criticised in the House of Commons as "humble, wheedling, and caressing."
In addition, however, to his legal arguments, his senatorial speeches, and his state papers, Webster is to be considered as the greatest orator our country has produced in his addresses before miscellaneous assemblages of the people. In saying this we do not confine the remark to such noble orations as those on the "First Settlement of New England," "The Bunker Hill Monument," and "Adams and Jefferson," but extend it so as to include speeches before great masses of people who could be hardly distinguished from a mob, and who were under no restraint but that imposed by their own self-respect and their respect for the orator. On these occasions he was uniformly successful. It is impossible to detect, in any reports of these popular addresses, that he ever stooped to employ a style of speech or mode of argument commonly supposed appropriate to a speaker on the "stump"; and yet he was the greatest "stump" orator that our country has ever seen. He seemed to delight in addressing five, or ten, or even twenty thousand people, in the open air, trusting that the penetrating tones of his voice would reach even the ears of those who were on the ragged edges of the swaying crowd before him; and he would thus speak to the sovereign people, in their unorganized state as a collection of uneasy and somewhat belligerent individuals, with a dignity and majesty similar to the dignity and majesty which characterized his arguments before the Senate of the United States, or before a bench of judges. A large portion of his published works consist of such speeches, and they rank only second among the remarkable productions of his mind.
The question arises, How could he hold the attention of such audiences without condescending to flatter their prejudices, or without occasionally acting the part of the sophist and the buffoon? Much may be said, in accounting for this phenomenon, about his widely extended reputation, his imposing presence, the vulgar curiosity to see a man whom even the smallest country newspaper thought of sufficient importance to defame, his power of giving vitality to simple words which the most ignorant of his auditors could easily understand, and the instinctive respect which the rudest kind of men feel for a grand specimen of robust manhood. But the real, the substantial source of his power over such audiences proceeded from his respect forthem; and their respect for him was more or less consciously founded on the perception of this fact.
Indeed, a close scrutiny of his speeches will show how conscientiously he regards the rights of other minds, however inferior they may be to his own; and this virtue, for it is a virtue, is never more apparent than in his arguments and appeals addressed to popular assemblies. No working-man, whether farmer, mechanic, factory "hand," or day-laborer, ever deemed himself insulted by a word from the lips of Daniel Webster; he felt himself rather exalted in his own esteem, for the time, by coming in contact with that beneficent and comprehensive intelligence, which cherished among its favorite ideas a scheme for lifting up the American laborer to a height of comfort and respectability which the European laborer could hardly hope to attain. Prominent politicians, men of wealth and influence, statesmen of high social and political rank, may, at times, have considered Webster as arrogant and bad-tempered, and may, at times, have felt disposed to fasten a quarrel upon him; even in Massachusetts this disposition broke out in conventions of the party to which he belonged; but it would be in vain to find a single laboring-man, whether he met Webster in private, or half pushed and half fought his way into a mass meeting, in order to get his ears into communication with the orator's voice, who ever heard a word from him which did not exalt the dignity of labor, or which was not full of sympathy for the laborer's occasional sorrows and privations. Webster seemed to have ever present to his mind the poverty of the humble home of his youth. His father, his brothers, he himself, had all been brought up to consider manual toil a dignified occupation, and as consistent with the exercise of all the virtues which flourish under the domestic roof. More than this, it may be said that, with the exception of a few intimate friends, his sympathies to the last were most warmly with common laborers. Indeed, if we closely study the private correspondence of this statesman, who was necessarily brought into relations, more or less friendly, with the conventionally great men of the world, European as well as American, we shall find that, after all, he took more real interest in Seth Peterson, and John Taylor, and Porter Wright, men connected with him in fishing and farming, than he did in the ambassadors of foreign states whom he met as Senator or as Secretary of State, or in all the members of the polite society of Washington, New York, and Boston. He was very near to Nature himself; and the nearer a man was to Nature, the more he esteemed him. Thus persons who superintended his farms and cattle, or who pulled an oar in his boat when he ventured out in search of cod and halibut, thought "Squire Webster" a man who realized their ideal and perfection of good-fellowship while it may confidently be said that many of his closest friends among men of culture, including lawyers, men of letters, and statesmen of the first rank, must have occasionally resented the "anfractuosities" of his mood and temper. But Seth Peterson, and Porter Wright, and John Taylor, never complained of these "anfractuosities." Webster, in fact, is one of the few public men of the country in whose championship of the rights and sympathy with the wrongs of labor there is not the slightest trace of the arts of the demagogue; and in this fact we may find the reason why even the "roughs," who are present in every mass meeting, always treated him with respect. Perhaps it would not be out of place to remark here, that, in his Speech of the 7th of March, he missed a grand opportunity to vindicate Northern labor, in the reference he made to a foolish tirade of a Senator from Louisiana, who "took pains to run a contrast between the slaves of the South and the laboring people of the North, giving the preference, in all points of condition, of comfort, and happiness, to the slaves of the South." Webster made a complete reply to this aspersion on Northern labor; but, as his purpose was to conciliate, he did not blast the libeller by quoting the most eminent example that could be named demonstrating the falsehood of the slave-holding Senator's assertion. Without deviating from the conciliatory attitude he had assumed, one could easily imagine him as lifting his large frame to its full height, flashing from his rebuking eyes a glance of scorn at the "amiable Senator," and simply saying, "Ibelong to the class which the Senator from Louisiana stigmatizes as more degraded than the slaves of the South." There was not at the time any Senator from the South, except Mr. Calhoun, that the most prejudiced Southern man would have thought of comparing with Webster in respect to intellectual eminence; and, if Webster had then and there placed himself squarely on his position as the son of a Northern laborer, we should have been spared all the rhetoric about Northern "mud-sills," with which the Senate was afterwards afflicted. Webster was our man of men; and it would seem that he should have crushed such talk at the outset, by proudly assuming that Northern labor was embodied and impersonated in him,—that HE had sprung from its ranks, and was proud of his ancestry.
An ingenious and powerful, but paradoxical thinker, once told me that I was mistaken in calling Jonathan Edwards and Daniel Webster great reasoners. "They were bad reasoners," he added, "but great poets." Without questioning the right of the author of "An Enquiry into the Modern Prevailing Notion of that Freedom of the Will, which is supposed to be Essential to Moral Agency," to be ranked among the most eminent of modern logicians, I could still understand why he was classed among poets; for whether Edwards paints the torments of hell or the bliss of heaven, his imagination almost rivals that of Dante in intensity of realization. But it was at first puzzling to comprehend why Webster should be depressed as a reasoner in order to be exalted as a poet. The images and metaphors scattered over his speeches are so evidently brought in to illustrate and enforce his statements and arguments, that, grand as they often are, the imagination displayed in them is still a faculty strictly subsidiary to the reasoning power. It was only after reflecting patiently for some time on the seeming paradox that I caught a glimpse of my friend's meaning; and it led me at once to consider an entirely novel question, not heretofore mooted by any of Webster's critics, whether friendly or unfriendly, in their endeavors to explain the reason of his influence over the best minds of the generation to which he belonged. In declaring that, as a poet, he far exceeded any capacity he evinced as a reasoner, my paradoxical friend must have meant that Webster had the poet's power of soorganizinga speech, that it stood out to the eye of the mind as a palpable intellectual product and fact, possessing, not merely that vague reality which comes from erecting a plausible mental structure of deductive argumentation, based on strictly limited premises, but a positive reality, akin to the products of Nature herself, when she tries her hand in constructing a ledge of rocks or rearing a chain of hills.
In illustration, it may be well to cite the example of poets with whom Webster, of course, cannot be compared. Among the great mental facts, palpable to the eyes of all men interested in literature, are such creations as the Iliad, the Divine Comedy, the great Shakspearian dramas, the Paradise Lost, and Faust. The commentaries and criticisms on these are numerous enough to occupy the shelves of a large library; some of them attempt to show that Homer, Dante, Shakspeare, Milton, and Goethe were all wrong in their methods of creation; but they still cannot obscure, to ordinary vision, the lustre of these luminaries as they placidly shine in the intellectual firmament, which is literallyoverour heads. They are as palpable, to the eye of the mind, as Sirius, Arcturus, the Southern Cross, and the planets Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn, are to the bodily sense. M. Taine has recently assailed the Paradise Lost with the happiest of French epigrams; he tries to prove that, in construction, it is the most ridiculously inartistic monstrosity that the imagination of a great mind ever framed out of chaos; but, after we have thoroughly enjoyed the play of his wit, there the Paradise Lost remains, an undisturbed object in the intellectual heavens, disdaining to justify its right to exist on any other grounds than the mere fact of its existence; and, certainly, not more ridiculous than Saturn himself, as we look at him through a great equatorial telescope, swinging through space encumbered with his clumsy ring, and his wrangling family of satellites, but still, in spite of peculiarities on which M. Taine might exercise his wit until doomsday, one of the most beautiful and sublime objects which the astronomer can behold in the whole phenomena of the heavens.
Indeed, in reading criticisms on such durable poetic creations and organizations as we have named, one is reminded of Sydney Smith's delicious chaffing of his friend Jeffrey, on account of Jeffrey's sensitiveness of literary taste, and his inward rage that events, men, and books, outside of him, do not correspond to the exacting rules which are the products of his own subjective and somewhat peevish intelligence. "I like," says Sydney, "to tell you these things, because you never do so well as when you are humbled and frightened, and, ifyou could be alarmed into the semblance of modesty, you would charm everybody; but remember my joke against you about the moon: 'D—n the solar system! bad light—planets too distant—pestered with comets—feeble contrivance; could make a better with great ease.'"
Now when a man, in whatever department or direction of thought his activity is engaged, succeeds in organizing, or even welding together, the materials on which he works, so that the product, as a whole, isvisibleto the mental eye, as a new creation or construction, he has an immense advantage over all critics of his performance. Refined reasonings are impotent to overthrow it; epigrams glance off from it, as rifle-bullets rebound when aimed at a granite wall; and it stands erect long after the reasonings and the epigrams are forgotten. Even when its symmetry is destroyed by a long and destructive siege, a pile of stones still remains, as at Fort Sumter, to attest what power of resistance it opposed to all the resources of modern artillery.
If we look at Webster's greatest speeches, as, for instance, "The Reply to Hayne," "The Constitution not a Compact between Sovereign States," "The President's Protest," and others that might be mentioned, we shall find that they partake of the character of organic formations, or at least of skilful engineering or architectural constructions. Even Mr. Calhoun never approached him in this art of giving objective reality to a speech, which, after all, is found, on analysis, to consist only of a happy collocation and combination of words, but in Webster the words are either all alive with the creative spirit of the poet, or, at the worst, resemble the blocks of granite or marble which the artisan piles, one on the other, and the result of which, though it may represent a poor style of architecture, is still a rude specimen of a Gothic edifice. The artist and artificer are both observable in Webster's work; but the reality and solidity of the construction cannot be questioned. At the present time, an educated reader would be specially interested in the mental processes by which Webster thus succeeded in giving objective existence and validity to the operations of his mind, and, whether sympathizing with his opinions or not, would as little think of refusing to read them because of their Whiggism, as he would think of refusing to read Homer because of his heathenism, or Dante because of his Catholicism, or Milton because of his compound of Arianism and Calvinism, or Goethe because of his Pantheism. The fact which would most interest such a reader would be, that Webster had, in some mysterious way, translated and transformed his abstract propositions into concrete substance and form. The form might offend his reason, his taste, or his conscience; but he could not avoid admitting that ithada form, while most speeches, even those made by able men, are comparatively formless, however lucid they may be in the array of facts, and plausible in the order and connection of arguments.
In trying to explain this power, the most obvious comparison which would arise in the mind of an intelligent reader would be, that Webster, as a rhetorician, resembled Vauban and Cohorn as military engineers. In the war of debate, he sofortifiedthe propositions he maintained, that they could not be carried by direct assault, but must be patiently besieged. The words he employed were simple enough, and fell short of including the vocabulary of even fifth-rate declaimers; but he had the art of so disposing them that, to an honest reasoner, the position he took appeared to be impregnable. To assail it by the ordinary method of passionate protest and illogical reasoning, was as futile as a dash of light cavalry would have been against the defences of such cities as Namur and Lille. Indeed, in his speech, "The Constitution not a Compact between Sovereign States," he erected a whole Torres Vedras line of fortifications, on which legislative Massenas dashed themselves in vain, and, however strong in numbers in respect to the power of voting him down, recoiled defeated in every attempt to reason him down.
In further illustration of this peculiar power of Webster, the Speech of the 7th of March, 1850, may be cited, for its delivery is to be ranked with the most important historical events. For some years it was the object of the extremes of panegyric and the extremes of execration. But this effort is really the most loosely constructed of all the great productions of Webster's mind. In force, compactness, and completeness, in closeness of thought to things, in closeness of imagery to the reasoning it illustrates, and in general intellectual fibre, muscle, and bone, it cannot be compared to such an oration as that on the "First Settlement of New England," or such a speech as that which had for its theme, "The Constitution not a Compact between Sovereign States"; but, after all deductions have been made, it was still a speech which frowned upon its opponents as a kind of verbal fortress constructed both for the purpose of defence and aggression. Its fame is due, in a great degree, to its resistance to a storm of assaults, such as had rarely before been concentrated on any speech delivered in either branch of the Congress of the United States. Indeed, a very large portion of the intellect, the moral sentiment, and the moral passion of the free States was directed against it. There was not a weapon in the armory of the dialectician or the rhetorician which was not employed with the intent of demolishing it. Contempt of Webster was vehemently taught as the beginning of political wisdom. That a speech, thus assailed, should survive the attacks made upon it, appeared to be impossible. And yet it did survive, and is alive now, while better speeches, or what the present writer thought, at the time, to be more convincing speeches, have not retained individual existence, however deeply they may have influenced that public opinion which, in the end, determines political events. "I still live," was Webster's declaration on his death-bed, when the friends gathered around it imagined he had breathed his last; and the same words might be uttered by the Speech of the 7th of March, could it possess the vocal organ which announces personal existence. Between the time it was originally delivered and the present year there runs a great and broad stream of blood, shed from the veins of Northern and Southern men alike; the whole political and moral constitution of the country has practically suffered an abrupt change; new problems engage the attention of thoughtful statesmen; much is forgotten which was once considered of the first importance; but the 7th of March Speech, battered as it is by innumerable attacks, is still remembered at least as one which called forth more power than it embodied in itself. This persistence of life is due to the fact that it was "organized."
Is this power of organization common among orators? It seems to me that, on the contrary, it is very rare. In some of Burke's speeches, in which his sensibility and imagination were thoroughly under the control of his judgment, as, for instance, his speech on Conciliation with America, that on Economical Reform, and that to the Electors of Bristol, we find the orator to be a consummate master of the art of so constructing a speech that it serves the immediate object which prompted its delivery, while at the same time it has in it a principle of vitality which makes it survive the occasion that called it forth. But the greatest of Burke's speeches, if we look merely at the richness and variety of mental power and the force and depth of moral passion displayed in it, is his speech on the Nabob of Arcot's Debts. No speech ever delivered before any assembly, legislative, judicial, or popular, can rank with this in respect to the abundance of its facts, reasonings, and imagery, and the ferocity of its moral wrath. It resembles the El Dorado that Voltaire's Candide visited, where the boys played with precious stones of inestimable value, as our boys play with ordinary marbles; for to the inhabitants of El Dorado diamonds and pearls were as common as pebbles are with us.
But the defect of this speech, which must still be considered, on the whole, the most inspired product of Burke's great nature, was this,— that it did not strike its hearers or readers as havingrealityfor its basis or the superstructure raised upon it. Englishmen could not believe then, and most of them probably do not believe now, that it had any solid foundation in incontrovertible facts. It did not "fit in" to their ordinary modes of thought; and it has never been ranked with Burke's "organized" orations; it has never come home to what Bacon called the "business and bosoms" of his countrymen. They have generally dismissed it from their imaginations as "a phantasmagoria and a hideous dream" created by Burke under the impulse of the intense hatred he felt for the administration which succeeded the overthrow of the government, which was founded on the coalition of Fox and North.
Now, in simple truth, the speech is the most masterly statement of facts, relating to the oppression of millions of the people of India, which was ever forced on the attention of the House of Commons,—a legislative assembly which, it may be incidentally remarked, was practically responsible for the just government of the immense Indian empire of Great Britain. It is curious that the main facts on which the argument of Burke rests have been confirmed by James Mill, the coldest-blooded historian that ever narrated the enormous crimes which attended the rise and progress of the British power in Hindostan, and a man who also had a strong intellectual antipathy to the mind of Burke. In making the speech, Burke had documentary evidence of a large portion of the transactions he denounced, and haddivinedthe rest. Mill supports him both as regards the facts of which Burke had positive knowledge, and the facts which he deductively inferred from the facts he knew. Having thus a strong foundation for his argument, he exerted every faculty of his mind, and every impulse of his moral sentiment and moral passion, to overwhelm the leading members of the administration of Pitt, by attempting to make them accomplices in crimes which would disgrace even slave-traders on the Guinea coast. The merely intellectual force of his reasoning is crushing; his analysis seems to be sharpened by his hatred; and there is no device of contempt, scorn, derision, and direct personal attack, which he does not unsparingly use. In the midst of all this mental tumult, inestimable maxims of moral and political wisdom are shot forth in short sentences, which have so much of the sting and brilliancy of epigram, that at first we do not appreciate their depth of thought; and through all there burns such a pitiless fierceness of moral reprobation of cruelty, injustice, and wrong, that all the accredited courtesies of debate are violated, once, at least, in every five minutes. In any American legislative assembly he would have been called to order at least once in five minutes. The images which the orator brings in to give vividness to his argument are sometimes coarse; but, coarse as they are, they admirably reflect the moral turpitude of the men against whom he inveighs. Among these is the image with which he covers Dundas, the special friend of Pitt, with a ridicule which promises to be immortal. Dundas, on the occasion when Fox and Burke called for papers by the aid of which they proposed to demonstrate the iniquity of the scheme by which the ministry proposed to settle the debts of the Nabob of Arcot, pretended that the production of such papers would be indelicate,—"that this inquiry is of a delicate nature, and that the state will suffer detriment by the exposure of this transaction." As Dundas had previously brought out six volumes of Reports, generally confirming Burke's own views of the corruption and oppression which marked the administration of affairs in India, he laid himself open to Burke's celebrated assault. Dundas and delicacy, he said, were "a rare and singular coalition." And then follows an image of colossal coarseness, such as might be supposed capable of rousing thunder-peals of laughter from a company of festive giants,—an image which Lord Brougham declared offendedhissensitive taste,—the sensitive taste of one of the most formidable legal and legislative bullies that ever appeared before the juries or Parliament of Great Britain, and who never hesitated to use any illustration, however vulgar, which he thought would be effective to degrade his opponents.
But whatever may be thought of the indelicacy of Burke's image, it was one eminently adapted to penetrate through the thick hide of the minister of state at whom it was aimed, and it shamed him as far as a profligate politician like Dundas was capable of feeling the sensation of shame. But there are also flashes, or rather flames, of impassioned imagination, in the same speech, which rush up from the main body of its statements and arguments, and remind us of nothing so much as of those jets of incandescent gas which, we are told by astronomers, occasionally leap, from the extreme outer covering of the sun, to the height of a hundred or a hundred and sixty thousand miles, and testify to the terrible forces raging within it. After reading this speech for the fiftieth time, the critic cannot free himself from the rapture of admiration and amazement which he experienced in his first fresh acquaintance with it. Yet its delivery in the House of Commons (February 28, 1785) produced an effect so slight, that Pitt, after a few minutes' consultation with Grenville, concluded that it was not worth the trouble of being answered; and the House of Commons, obedient to the Prime Minister's direction, negatived, by a large majority, the motion in advocating which Burke poured out the wonderful treasures of his intellect and imagination. To be sure, the House was tired to death with the discussion, was probably very sleepy, and the orator spoke five hours after the members had already shouted, "Question! Question!"
The truth is, that this speech, unmatched though it is in the literature of eloquence, had not, as has been previously stated, the air of reality. It struck the House as a magnificent Oriental dream, as an Arabian Nights' Entertainment, as a tale told by an inspired madman, "full of sound and fury, signifying nothing"; and the evident partisan intention of the orator to blast Pitt's administration by exhibiting its complicity in one of the most enormous frauds recorded in history, confirmed the dandies, the cockneys, the bankers, and the country gentlemen, who, as members of the House of Commons, stood by Pitt with all the combined force of their levity, their venality, and their stupidity, in the propriety of voting Burke down. And even now, when the substantial truth of all the facts he alleged is established on evidence which convinces historians, the admiring reader can understand why it failed to convince Burke's contemporaries, and why it still appears to lack the characteristics of a speech thoroughly organized. Indeed, the mind of Burke, when it was delivered, can only be compared to a volcanic mountain in eruption;—not merely a volcano like that of Vesuvius, visited by scientists and amateurs in crowds, when it deigns to pour forth its flames and lava for the entertainment of the multitude; but a lonely volcano, like that of Etna, rising far above Vesuvius in height, far removed from all the vulgar curiosity of a body of tourists, but rending the earth on which it stands with the mighty earthquake throes of its fiery centre and heart. The moral passion,—perhaps it would be more just to say the moral fury,—displayed in the speech, is elemental, and can be compared to nothing less intense than the earth's interior fire and heat.
Now in Webster's great legislative efforts, his mind is never exhibited in a state of eruption. In the most excited debates in which he bore a prominent part, nothing strikes us more than the admirable self-possession, than the majestic inward calm, which presides over all the operations of his mind and the impulses of his sensibility, so that, in building up the fabric of his speech, he has his reason, imagination, and passion under full control,—using each faculty and feeling as the occasion may demand, but never allowing himself to be usedbyit,—and always therefore conveying the impression of power in reserve, while he may, in fact, be exercising all the power he has to the utmost. In laboriously erecting his edifice of reasoning he also studiously regards the intellects and the passions of ordinary men; strives to bring his mind into cordial relations with theirs; employs every faculty he possesses to give reality, to give even visibility, to his thoughts; and though he never made a speech which rivals that of Burke on the Nabob of Arcot's Debts, in respect to grasp of understanding, astounding wealth of imagination and depth of moral passion, he always so contrived to organize his materials into a complete whole, that the result stood out clearly to the sight of the mind, as a structure resting on strong foundations, and reared to due height by the mingled skill of the artisan and the artist. When he does little more than weld his materials together, he is still an artificer of the old school of giant workmen, the school that dates its pedigree from Tubal Cain.
After all this wearisome detail and dilution of the idea attempted to be expressed, it may be that I have failed to convey an adequate impression of what constitutes Webster's distinction among orators, as far as orators have left speeches which are considered an invaluable addition to the literature of the language in which they were originally delivered. Everybody understands why any one of the great sermons of Jeremy Taylor, or the sermon of Dr. South on "Man created in the Image of God," or the sermon of Dr. Barrow on "Heavenly Rest," differs from the millions on millions of doubtless edifying sermons that have been preached and printed during the last two centuries and a half; but everybody does not understand the distinction between one brilliant oration and another, when both made a great sensation at the time, while only one survived in literature. Probably Charles James Fox was a more effective speaker in the House of Commons than Edmund Burke, probably Henry Clay was a more effective speaker in Congress than Daniel Webster; but when the occasions on which their speeches were made are found gradually to fade from the memory of men, why is it that the speeches of Fox and Clay have no recognized position in literature, while those of Burke and Webster are ranked with literary productions of the first class? The reason is as really obvious as that which explains the exceptional value of some of the efforts of the great orators of the pulpit. Jeremy Taylor, Dr. South, and Dr. Barrow, different as they were in temper and disposition, succeeded in "organizing" some masterpieces in their special department of intellectual and moral activity; and the same is true of Burke and Webster in the departments of legislation and political science. The "occasion" was merely an opportunity for the consolidation into a speech of the rare powers and attainments, the large personality and affluent thought, which were the spiritual possessions of the man who made it,—a speech which represented the whole intellectual manhood of the speaker,—a manhood in which knowledge, reason, imagination, and sensibility were all consolidated under the directing power of will.
A pertinent example of the difference we have attempted to indicate may be easily found in contrasting Fox's closing speech on the East India Bill with Burke's on the same subject. For immediate effect on the House of Commons, it ranks with the most masterly of Fox's Parliamentary efforts. The hits on his opponents were all "telling." Theargumentum ad hominem, embodied in short, sharp statements, or startling interrogatories, was never employed with more brilliant success. The reasoning was rapid, compact, encumbered by no long enumeration of facts, and, though somewhat unscrupulous here and there, was driven home upon his adversaries with a skill that equalled its audacity. It may be said that there is not a sentence in the whole speech which was not calculated to sting a sleepy audience into attention, or to give delight to a fatigued audience which still managed to keep its eyes and minds wide open. Even in respect to the principles of liberty and justice, which were the animating life of the bill, Fox's terse sentences contrast strangely with the somewhat more lumbering and elaborate paragraphs of Burke. "What," he exclaims, putting his argument in his favorite interrogative form,—"what is the most odious species of tyranny? Precisely that which this bill is meant to annihilate. That a handful of men, free themselves, should exercise the most base and abominable despotism over millions of their fellow-creatures; that innocence should be the victim of oppression; that industry should toil for rapine; that the harmless laborer should sweat, not for his own benefit, but for the luxury and rapacity of tyrannic depredation;—in a word, that thirty millions of men, gifted by Providence with the ordinary endowments of humanity, should groan under a system of despotism unmatched in all the histories of the world? What is the end of all government? Certainly, the happiness of the governed. Others may hold different opinions; but this is mine, and I proclaim it. What, then, are we to think of a government whose good fortune is supposed to spring from the calamities of its subjects, whose aggrandizement grows out of the miseries of mankind? This is the kind of government exercised under the East Indian Company upon the natives of Hindostan; and the subversion of that infamous government is the main object of the bill in question." And afterwards he says, with admirable point and pungency of statement: "Every line in both the bills which I have had the honor to introduce, presumes the possibility of bad administration; for every word breathes suspicion. This bill supposes that men are but men. It confides in no integrity; it trusts no character; it inculcates the wisdom of a jealousy of power, and annexes responsibility, not only to everyaction, but even to theinactionof those who are to dispense it. The necessity of these provisions must be evident, when it is known that the different misfortunes of the company have resulted not more from what their servantsdid, than from what themasters did not."
There is a directness in such sentences as these which we do not find in Burke's speech on the East India Bill; but Burke's remains as a part of English literature, and in form and substance, especially in substance, is so immensely superior to that of Fox, that, in quoting sentences from the latter, one may almost be supposed to rescue them from that neglect which attends all speeches which do not reach beyond the occasion which calls them forth. In Bacon's phrase, the speech of Fox shows "small matter, and infinite agitation of wit"; in Burke's, we discern large matter with an abundance of "wit" proper to the discussion of the matter, but nothing which suggests the idea of mere "agitation." Fox, in his speeches, subordinated every thing to the immediate impression he might make on the House of Commons. He deliberately gave it as his opinion, that a speech that read well must be a bad speech; and, in a literary sense, the House of Commons, which he entered before he was twenty, may be called both the cradle and the grave of his fame. It has been said that he was a debater whose speeches should be studied by every man who wishes "to learn the science of logical defence"; that he alone, among English orators, resembles Demosthenes, inasmuch as his reasoning is "penetrated and made red-hot by passion"; and that nothing could excel the effect of his delivery when "he was in the full paroxysm of inspiration, foaming, screaming, choked by the rushing multitude of his words." But not one of his speeches, not even that on the East India Bill, or on the Westminster Scrutiny, or on the Russian Armament, or on Parliamentary Reform, or on Mr. Pitt's Rejection of Bonaparte's Overtures for Peace, has obtained an abiding place in the literature of Great Britain. It would be no disparagement to an educated man, if it were said that he had never read these speeches; but it would be a serious bar to his claim to be considered an English scholar, if he confessed to be ignorant of the great speeches of Burke; for such a confession would be like admitting that he had never read the first book of Hooker's Ecclesiastical Polity, Bacon's Essays and Advancement of Learning, Milton's Areopagitica, Butler's Analogy, and Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations.
When we reflect on the enormous number of American speeches which, when they were first delivered, were confidently predicted, by appreciating friends, to insure to the orators a fame which would be immortal, one wonders a little at the quiet persistence of the speeches of Webster in refusing to die with the abrupt suddenness of other orations, which, at the time of their delivery, seemed to have an equal chance of renown. The lifeless remains of such unfortunate failures are now entombed in that dreariest of all mausoleums, the dingy quarto volumes, hateful to all human eyes, which are lettered on the back with the title of "Congressional Debates,"—a collection of printed matter which members of Congress are wont to send to a favored few among their constituents, and which are immediately consigned to the dust-barrel or sold to pedlers in waste paper, according as the rage of the recipients takes a scornful or an economical direction. It would seem that the speeches of Webster are saved from this fate, by the fact that, in them, the mental and moral life of a great man, and of a great master of the English language, are organized in a palpable intellectual form. The reader feels that they have some of the substantial qualities which he recognizes in looking at the gigantic constructions of the master workmen among the crowd of the world's engineers and architects, in looking at the organic products of Nature herself, and in surveying, through the eye of his imagination, those novel reproductions of Nature which great poets have embodied in works which are indelibly stamped with the character of deathlessness.
But Webster is even more obviously a poet—subordinating "the shows of things to the desires of the mind"—in his magnificent idealization, or idolization, of the Constitution and the Union. By the magic of his imagination and sensibility he contrived to impress on the minds of a majority of the people of the free States a vague, grand idea that the Constitution was a sacred instrument of government,—a holy shrine of fundamental law, which no unhallowed hands could touch without profanation,—a digested system of rights and duties, resembling those institutes which were, in early times, devised by the immortal gods for the guidance of infirm mortal man; and the mysterious creatures, half divine and half human, who framed this remarkable document, were always reverently referred to as "the Fathers,"—as persons who excelled all succeeding generations in sagacity and wisdom; as inspired prophets, who were specially selected by Divine Providence to frame the political scriptures on which our political faith was to be based, and by which our political reason was to be limited. The splendor of the glamour thus cast over the imaginations and sentiments of the people was all the more effective because it was an effluence from the mind of a statesman who, of all other statesmen of the country, was deemed the most practical, and the least deluded by any misguiding lights of fancy and abstract speculation.
There can be little doubt that Webster's impressive idealization of the Constitution gave a certain narrowness to American thinking on constitutional government and the science of politics and legislation. Foreigners, of the most liberal views, could not sometimes restrain an expression of wonder, when they found that our most intelligent men, even our jurists and publicists, hardly condescended to notice the eminent European thinkers on the philosophy of government, so absorbed were they in the contemplation of the perfection of their own. When the great civil war broke out, hundreds of thousands of American citizens marched to the battle-field with the grand passages of Webster glowing in their hearts. They met death cheerfully in the cause of the "Constitution and Union," as by him expounded and idealized; and if they were so unfortunate as not to be killed, but to be taken captive, they still rotted to death in Southern prisons, sustained by sentences of Webster's speeches which they had declaimed as boys in their country schools. Of all the triumphs of Webster as a leader of public opinion, the most remarkable was his infusing into the minds of the people of the free States the belief that the Constitution as it existed in his time was an organic fact, springing from the intelligence, hearts, and wills of the people of the United States, and not, as it really was, an ingenious mechanical contrivance of wise men, to which the people, at the time, gave their assent.
The constitutions of the separate States of the Union were doubtless rooted in the habits, sentiments, and ideas of their inhabitants. But the Constitution of the United States could not possess this advantage, however felicitously it may have been framed for the purpose of keeping, for a considerable period, peace between the different sections of the country. As long, therefore, as the institution of negro slavery lasted, it could not be called a Constitution of States organically "United"; for it lacked the principle ofgrowth, which characterizes all constitutions of government which are really adapted to the progressive needs of a people, if the people have in them any impulse which stimulates them to advance. The unwritten constitution of Great Britain has this advantage, that a decree of Parliament can alter the whole representative system, annihilating by a vote of the two houses all laws which the Parliament had enacted in former years. In Great Britain, therefore, a measure which any Imperial Parliament passes becomes at once the supreme law of the land, though it may nullify a great number of laws which previous Parliaments had passed under different conditions of the sentiment of the nation. Our Constitution, on the other hand, provides for the contingencies of growth in the public sentiment only by amendments to the Constitution. These amendments require more than a majority of all the political forces represented in Congress; and Mr. Calhoun, foreseeing that a collision must eventually occur between the two sections, carried with him, not only the South, but a considerable minority of the North, in resisting any attempt to limit theextensionof slavery. On this point the passions and principles of the people of the slave-holding and the majority of the people of the non-slave-holding States came into violent opposition; and there was no possibility that any amendment to the Constitution could be ratified, which would represent either the growth of the Southern people in their ever-increasing belief that negro slavery was not only a good in itself, but a good which ought to be extended, or the growth of the Northern people in their ever-increasing hostility both to slavery and its extension. Thus two principles, each organic in its nature, and demanding indefinite development, came into deadly conflict under the mechanical forms of a Constitution which was not organic.
A considerable portion of the speeches in this volume is devoted to denunciations of violations of the Constitution perpetrated by Webster's political opponents. These violations, again, would seem to prove that written constitutions follow practically the same law of development which marks the progress of the unwritten. By a strained system of Congressional interpretation, the Constitution has been repeatedly compelled to yield to the necessities of the party dominant, for the time, in the government; and has, if we may believe Webster, been repeatedly changed without being constitutionally "amended." The causes which led to the most terrible civil war recorded in history were silently working beneath the forms of the Constitution,—both parties, by the way, appealing to its provisions,—while Webster was idealizing it as the utmost which humanity could come to in the way of civil government. In 1848, when nearly all Europe was in insurrection against its rulers, he proudly said that our Constitution promised to be theoldest, as well as the best, in civilized states. Meanwhile the institution of negro slavery was undermining the whole fabric of the Union. The moral division between the South and North was widening into a division between the religion of the two sections. The Southern statesmen, economists, jurists, publicists, and ethical writers had adapted their opinions to the demands which the defenders of the institution of slavery imposed on the action of the human intellect and conscience; but it was rather startling to discover that the Christian religion, as taught in the Southern States, was a religion which had no vital connection with the Christianity taught in the Northern States. There is nothing more astounding, to a patient explorer of the causes which led to the final explosion, than this opposition of religions. The mere form of the dogmas common to the religion of both sections might be verbally identical; but a volume of sermons by a Southern doctor of divinity, as far as he touched on the matter of slavery, was as different from one published by his Northern brother, in the essential moral and humane elements of Christianity, as though they were divided from each other by a gulf as wide as that which yawns between a Druid priest and a Christian clergyman.
The politicians of the South, whether they were the mouthpieces of the ideas and passions of their constituents, or were, as Webster probably thought, more or less responsible for their foolishness and bitterness, were ever eager to precipitate a conflict, which Webster was as eager to prevent, or at least to postpone. It was fortunate for the North, that the inevitable conflict did not come in 1850, when the free States were unprepared for it. Ten years of discussion and preparation were allowed; when the war broke out, it found the North in a position to meet and eventually to overcome the enemies of the Union; and the Constitution, not as itwas, but as itis, now represents a form of government which promises to be permanent; for after passing through its baptism of fire and blood, the Constitution contains nothing which is not in harmony with any State government founded on the principle of equal rights which it guarantees, and is proof against all attacks but those which may proceed from the extremes of human folly and wickedness. But that, before the civil war, it was preserved so long under conditions which constantly threatened it with destruction, is due in a considerable degree to the circumstance that it found in Daniel Webster its poet as well as its "expounder."
In conclusion it may be said that the style of Webster is pre-eminently distinguished by manliness. Nothing little, weak, whining, or sentimental can be detected in any page of the six volumes of his works. A certain strength and grandeur of personality is prominent in all his speeches. When he says "I," or "my," he never appears to indulge in the bravado of self-assertion, because the words are felt to express a positive, stalwart, almost colossal manhood, which had already been implied in the close-knit sentences in which he embodied his statements and arguments. He is an eminent instance of the power which character communicates to style. Though evidently proud, self-respecting, and high-spirited, he is ever above mere vanity and egotism. Whenever he gives emphasis to the personal pronoun the reader feels that he had as much earned the right to make his opinion an authority, as he had earned the right to use the words he employs to express his ideas and sentiments. Thus, in the celebratedSmith Willtrial, his antagonist, Mr. Choate, quoted a decision of Lord Chancellor Camden. In his reply, Webster argued against its validity as though it were merely a proposition laid down by Mr. Choate. "But it is not mine, it is Lord Camden's" was the instant retort. Webster paused for half a minute, and then, with his eye fixed on the presiding judge, he replied: "Lord Camden was a great judge; he is respected by every American, for he was on our side in the Revolution; but, may it please your honor,Idiffer from my Lord Camden." There was hardly a lawyer in the United States who could have made such a statement without exposing himself to ridicule; but it did not seem at all ridiculous, when the "I" stood for Daniel Webster. In his early career as a lawyer, his mode of reasoning was such as to make him practically a thirteenth juror in the panel; when his fame was fully established, he contrived, in some mysterious way, to seat himself by the side of the judges on the bench, and appear to be consulting with them as a jurist, rather than addressing them as an advocate. The personality of the man was always suppressed until there seemed to be need of asserting it; and then it was proudly pushed into prominence, though rarely passing beyond the limits which his acknowledged eminence as a statesman and lawyer did not justify him in asserting it. Among the selections in the present volume where his individuality becomes somewhat aggressive, and breaks loose from the restraints ordinarily self-imposed on it, may be mentioned his speech on his Reception at Boston (1842), his Marshfield Speech (1848), and his speech at his Reception at Buffalo (1851). Whatever may be thought of the course of argument pursued in these, they are at least thoroughly penetrated with a manly spirit,—a manliness somewhat haughty and defiant, but still consciously strong in its power to return blow for blow, from whatever quarter the assault may come.