South Carolina, had spoken in favor of the doctrine of nullification; that the Federal Union was a mere compact between the states, existing only during the consent of the separate members; that each state retained the right to decide for itself whether or not a Federal law was constitutional.

Mr. Webster was to speak for the Union-an indivisible Union. He was to voice a popular but vague conception that the United States were not a confederation but a nation, and, as it afterward turned out, he was to give this theory definite form and perpetual life. John C. Calhoun, that gifted son of the South, a man of cool and penetrating mind, who had led the nullifiers up to this time, was in the presiding officer's chair.

When Webster arose a hush fell upon the Assembly, but the nervous strain was so great among the auditors that it was feared it would manifest itself in a way to disconcert the speaker.

"Mr. President," Webster began, in those softly modulated tones that were at once winning and soothing, "when the mariner has been tossed for many days in thick weather and on an unknown sea, he naturally avails himself of the first pause in the storm, the earliest glance of the sun, to take his latitude and ascertain how far the elements have driven him from his true course. Let us imitate this prudence, and before we float further on the wave of this debate refer to the point from which we departed, that we may at least be able to conjecture where we now are. I ask for the reading of the resolution before the Senate."

All writers agree that this was a piece of consummate art. Before the reading of the resolution had been completed the nervous tension was relaxed, the great audience breathed more freely and was prepared to give proper attention to the masterful oration that followed. Time and again were the listeners thrilled by Webster's persuasive eloquence, and many were moved to tears by his pathetic imagery and the tones of his voice.

DEFENSE OF MASSACHUSETTS.

With what a burst of eloquence did he reply to Hayne's attack upon his beloved Massachusetts:

"Mr. President, I shall enter on no encomium on Massachusetts. She needs none. There she is. Behold her, and judge for yourselves. There is her history. The world knows it by heart. The past, at least, is secure. There is Boston and Concord and Lexington and Bunker Hill; and there they will remain forever." As he concluded the famous apostrophe with the words, "It will fall at last, if fall it must, amidst the proudest monuments

of its own glory, and on the very spot of its origin," he turned his great eyes, glowing with feeling, upon a group of Massachusetts men, in a corner of the gallery, and it is recorded of these stern New Englanders that they shed tears like women. With "studied plainness," and "with as much precision as possible" he defined the true principles of the Constitution, and then burst into the magnificent peroration, hereinbefore quoted.

"The speech was over," writes one who heard it, "but the tones of the orator still lingered upon the ear, and the audience, unconscious of the close, retained their position. The agitated countenance, the heaving breast, the suffused eye, attested the continued influence of the spell upon them. Hands that in the excitement of the moment had sought each other still remained closed in an unconscious grasp. * When the Vice-President, hastening to dissolve the spell, angrily called, 'To order! order!' there never was a deeper stillness. Not a movement, not a gesture had been made, not a whisper uttered. Order! Silence could almost have heard itself, it was so supernaturally still."

The reply to Hayne is universally conceded to be Mr. Webster's masterpiece, and he refers to it in his private correspondence as "number one among my political efforts." The notes for this great speech, as was the case in his first reply to Hayne, were hastily jotted down on a small sheet of paper, yet the speech occupied four hours in delivery, and fills seventy octavo printed pages. While it was practically extemporaneous, Webster's entire life had been a preparation for this great effort, because his earliest and his best thoughts had been centered upon the Union and the greatness and grandeur of America as a nation.

Mr. Webster first gave evidence of his eloquence when a school boy, but the foundation of his reputation as an orator was laid in the practice of the law, and upon this foundation he built the mighty structure of oratorical grandeur during a public career of great brilliancy, but solemn and pathetic ending. He learned early in life that it was the substance, the idea, and not the form of speech, that made the successful orator.

"When I was a young man," Mr. Webster once remarked, "and first entered the law my style of oratory was as round and florid as Choate's. I do not think it is the best. It is not according to my taste." And again he said: "While in college I delivered two or three occasional addresses, which were published. I trust they are forgotten. They were in very bad taste. I had not then learned that all true power in writing is in the idea, not in the style."

CRIMSON WITH BLOOD AND GORGED WITH PIRATES.

One of the addresses to which Mr. Webster referred was a Fourth of July oration, delivered in his junior year. As it was his first experiment, the following extract will be interesting, and also for the further reason that it is a splendid illustration of that floridity of style characteristic of his youthful efforts:

"Columbia," he cried, "stoops not to tyrants. Her spirit will never cringe to France. Neither a supercilious five-headed directory nor the gasconading pilgrim of Egypt will ever dictate terms to sovereign America! The thunder of our cannon shall insure the performance of our treaties and fulminate destruction on the Frenchman till the ocean is crimson with blood and gorged with pirates."

But there were ideas as well as style in the utterances of the boy of eighteen:

"No sooner was peace restored with England (the first grand article of which was the acknowledgment of our independence) than the old system of confederation, dictated at first by necessity and adopted for the purposes of the moment, was found inadequate to the government of an extensive empire. Under a full conviction of this we then saw the people of these states engaged in a transaction which is undoubtedly the greatest approximation towards human perfection the political world has ever yet witnessed, and which, perhaps, will forever stand in the history of mankind without a parallel. A great Republic composed of different states, whose interest in all respects could not be perfectly compatible, then came deliberately forward, discarded one system of government and adopted another without the loss of one man's blood."

The idea that the United States, after the acknowledgment of independence by England, had discarded the confederation system and had adopted a national form of government was the foundation stone of Webster's reputation as an expounder of the constitution as it was the central idea of his speech in reply to Hayne.

Much of Webster's renown is built upon the series of orations known as the Memorial Addresses. The first, and the one which Mr. Webster considered the best, was the Plymouth Oration, delivered December 22d, 1820, to commemorate the landing of the Pilgrim Fathers. It not only contained an exposition of those principles of nationality (the basic principles of Web

ster's thought as a statesman and orator), but it likewise contained this passionate denunciation of slavery:

"In the sight of our law the African slave-trader is a pirate and a felon; and, in the sight of Heaven, an offender far beyond the ordinary depth of human guilt. There is no brighter page of our history than that which records the measures which have been adopted by the government, at an early day, and at different times since, for the suppression of this traffic; and I would call on all the true sons of New England to co-operate with the laws of man and the justice of Heaven. If there be, within the extent of our knowledge or influence, any participation in this traffic, let us pledge ourselves here, upon the Rock of Plymouth, to extirpate and destroy it. It is not fit that the land of the Pilgrims should bear the shame longer. I hear the sound of the hammer, I see the smoke of the furnaces, where manacles and fetters are still forged for human limbs. I see the visages of those who, by stealth and at midnight, labor in this work of Hell, foul and dark, as may become the artificers of such instruments of misery and torture. Let that spot be purified or let it cease to be of New England. Let it be purified or let it be set aside from the Christian world. Let it be put out of the circle of human sympathy and human regards, and let civilized man henceforth have no communion with it."

John Adams, who listened to the oration, wrote to Mr. Webster that Burke was no longer entitled to be called the most consummate orator of modern times. "If there be an American who can read it without tears I am not that American," he said. He also declared: "This oration will be read five hundred years hence with as much rapture as it was heard. It ought to be read at the end of every century, and, indeed, at the end of every year, forever and ever."

WEBSTER AT BUNKER HILL.

The second of the memorial addresses was delivered June 17, 1825, to commemorate the battle of Bunker Hill. The immense throng that gathered at the foot of the hill, where the great victory was won, wept over the famous address to the soldiers, beginning, "Venerable men," and cheered the equally famous greeting, "Welcome! All hail and thrice welcome, citizens of two hemispheres!" addressed to La Fayette. And then, when he dwelt upon the reason for the monuments, the enthusiasm of the crowd burst forth as he exclaimed:

"We wish, finally, that the last object to the sight of him who leaves

his native shore, and the first to gladden him who revisits it, may be something which shall remind him of the liberty and glory of his country. Let it rise! Let it rise till it meet the sun in his coming! Let the earliest light of the morning gild it, and parting day linger and play on its summit!”

A year later he paid the famous tribute to Adams and Jefferson, in which he put into the mouth of the former the thrilling and inspiring, but wholly imaginary, speech favoring the Declaration of Independence:

"Sink or swim, live or die, survive or perish, I give my hand and my heart to this vote."

Another of Mr. Webster's famous memorial addresses was on the character of Washington, delivered February 22, 1832. No finer or truer eulogy of the Father of His Country exists:

"His principle it was to act right and to trust the people for support; his principle it was not to follow the lead of sinister and selfish ends, nor to rely on the little arts of party delusion, to obtain public sanction for such a course. Born for his country and for the world, he did not give up to party what was meant for mankind. The consequence is that his fame is as durable as his principles, as lasting as truth and virtue themselves. While the hundreds whom party excitement and temporary circumstances and casual combinations have raised into transient notoriety, sink again, like thin bubbles bursting and dissolving into the great ocean, Washington's fame is like the rock which bounds that ocean, and at whose feet its billows are destined to break harmlessly forever. Among other admonitions Washington has left us, in his last communication to his country, an exhortation against the excesses of party spirit. A fire not to be quenched, he yet conjures us not to fan and feed the flame. Undoubtedly, gentleman, it is the greatest danger of our system and of our times."

*

Mr. Webster's second Bunker Hill speech was delivered June 17, 1843. In 1850 he made what is known as the famous Seventh of March speech, which, though wonderfully eloquent, was a great disappointment to the friends and followers that still refused to yield a single point on the question. of slavery. Probably the most eloquent passage in that speech is as follows:

"Mr. President, I wish to speak to-day not as a Massachusetts man, nor as a Northern man, but as an American, and a member of the Senate of the United States-a body to which the country looks, with confidence, for wise, moderate, patriotic and healing counsels. It is not to be denied that we live in the midst of strong agitation, and are surrounded by very considerable dangers to our institutions of government. The imprisoned winds