Law, some of them as novel as they were important, which had reference to the entrance or the attempted entrance of so many new states into the family of nations; in Europe-Greece, Belgium, Hungary; on this continent, twelve or fourteen new republics, great and small, bursting from the ruins of the Spanish colonial empire-like a group of asteroids from the wreck of an exploded planet; the invitation of the infant American Republics to meet them in Congress at Panama; our commercial relations with the British Colonies in the West Indies and on this continent; demands of several European states for spoliations on our commerce during the wars of the French Revolution; our secular controversy with England relative to the boundary of the United States on the North-Eastern and Pacific frontiers; our relations with Mexico, previous to the war; the immunity of the American flag upon the common jurisdiction of the ocean; and more important than all other questions, foreign or domestic, in its influence upon the general politics of the country, the great sectional controversy-not then first commenced, but greatly increased in warmth and urgency, which connected itself with the organization of the newly acquired Mexican territories.

Such were the chief questions on which it was Mr. Webster's duty to form opinions; as an influential member of Congress and a political leader to speak and to vote; as a member of the Executive Government to exercise a powerful, over some of them, a decisive control. Besides these there was another class of questions of great public importance, which came up for adjudication in the Courts of the United States, which he was called professionally to discuss. Many of the questions of each class now referred to divided and still divide opinion; excited and still excite the feelings of individuals, of parties, of sections of the country. There are some of them, which, in the course of a long life, under changing circumstances, are likely to be differently viewed at different periods by the same individual. I am not here to-day to rake off the warm ashes from the embers of controversies which have spent their fury and are dying away, or to fan the fires of those which still burn. But no one, I think, whether he agreed with Mr. Webster or differed from him as to any of these questions, will deny that he treated them each and all, as they came up in the Senate, in the Courts, or in negotiations with Foreign powers, in a broad, statesmanlike, and masterly way. There were few who would not confess, when they agreed with him, that he had expressed their opinions better than they could do it themselves; few, when they differed from him, who would not admit that he had maintained his own views manfully, powerfully, and liberally.

HIS CAREER AS A STATESMAN.

Such was the period in which Mr. Webster lived, such were the associates with whom he acted, the questions with which he had

to deal as statesman, jurist, the head of an administration of the government, and a public speaker. Let us contemplate him for a moment in either capacity.

Without passing through the preliminary stage of the State Legislature, and elected to Congress in six years from the time of his admission to the Superior Court of New Hampshire, he was, on his first entrance into the House of Representatives, placed by Mr. Speaker Clay on the Committee of Foreign Affairs, and took rank forthwith as one of the leading statesmen of the day. His first speech had reference to those famous Berlin and Milan decrees and Orders in Council, to which I have already alluded; and the impression produced by it was such as to lead the venerable Chief Justice Marshall eighteen years afterward, in writing to Mr. Justice Story, to say, "At the time when this speech was delivered I did not know Mr. Webster, but I was so much struck with it that I did not hesitate then to state that he was a very able man, and would become one of the very first statesmen in America, perhaps the very first." His mind at the very outset of his career had, by a kind of instinct, soared from the principles which govern the municipal relations of individuals to those great rules which dictate the Law of Nations to Independent States. He tells us, in the fragment of a diary kept while he was a law student in Mr. Gore's office, that he then read Vattel through for the third time. Accordingly, in after life, there was no subject which he discussed with greater pleasure and, I may add, with greater power, than_questions of the Law of Nations. The Revolution of Greece had from its outbreak attracted much of the attention of the civilized world. A people, whose ancestors had originally taught letters and arts to mankind, struggling to regain a place in the great family of independent states; the convulsive efforts of a Christian people, the foundation of whose churches by the Apostles in person is recorded in the New Testament, to shake off the yoke of Mohammedan despotism, possessed a strange interest for the friends of Christian Liberty throughout Europe and America. President Monroe had called the attention of Congress to this most interesting struggle in December, 1823; and Mr. Webster returning to Congress, after a retirement of eight years, as the representative of Boston, made the Greek Revolution the subject of a motion and a speech. In this speech he treated what he called "the great question of the daythe question between absolute and regulated governments." He engaged in a searching criticism of the doctrines of the "Holy Alliance," and maintained the duty of the United States, as a great free power, to protest against them. That speech remains, in my judgment, to this day the ablest and most effective remonstrance against the principles of the allied military powers of continental Europe. Mr. Jeremiah Mason pronounced it "the best sample of parliamentary eloquence and statesmanlike reasoning which our country had seen." His indignant protest against the spirit of absolutism, and

his words of sympathy with an infant People struggling for independence, were borne on the wings of the wind throughout Christendom. They were read in every language, at every court, in every cabinet, in every reading-room, on every market-place, by the Republicans of Mexico and Spanish South America, by the Reformers of Italy, the Patriots of Poland; on the Tagus, on the Danube, as well as at the head of the little armies of revolutionary Greece. The practical impression which it made on the American mind was seen in the liberality with which cargoes of food and clothing, a year or two afterward, were dispatched to the relief of the Greeks. No legislative or executive measure was adopted at that time in consequence of Mr. Webster's motion and speech; probably none was anticipated by him; but no one who considers how much the march of events in such cases is influenced by the moral sentiments, will doubt that a great word like this, spoken in the American Congress, must have had no slight effect in cheering the heart of Greece to persevere in their unequal but finally successful struggle.

It was by these masterly parliamentary efforts that Mr. Webster left his mark on the age in which he lived. His fidelity to his convictions kept him for the greater part of his life in a minority; a position which he regarded, not as a proscription, but as a post of honor and duty. He felt that in free governments and in a normal state of parties, an opposition is a political necessity, and that it has its duties not less responsible than those which attach to office. Before the importance of Mr. Webster's political services is disparaged for want of positive results, which can only be brought about by those who are clothed with power, it must be shown that to raise a persuasive and convincing voice in the vindication of truth and right, to uphold and assert the true principles of the government under which we live, and bring them home to the hearts of the people to do this from a sense of patriotic duty, and without hope of the honors and emoluments of office, to do it so as to instruct the public conscience and warm the public heart, is a less meritorious service to society than to touch with skillful hand the springs of party politics, and to hold together the often discordant elements of ill-compacted majorities.

The greatest parliamentary effort made by Mr. Webster was his second speech on Foot's resolution; the question at issue being nothing less than this: Is the Constitution of the United States a compact without a common umpire between confederated sovereignties, or is it a government of the People of the United States, sovereign within the sphere of its delegated powers, but reserving a great mass of undelegated rights to the separate State governments and the People. With those who embrace the opinions which Mr. Webster combated in this speech, this is not the time nor the place to engage in an argument; but those who believe that he maintained the true principles of the Constitution will

probably agree that since that Instrument was communicated to the Continental Congress, seventy-two years ago this day, by George Washington, as President of the Federal Convention, no greater service has been rendered to them than in the delivery of this speech. Well do I recollect the occasion and the scene. It was truly what Wellington called the battle of Waterloo, a conflict of Giants. I passed an hour and a half with Mr. Webster, at his request, the evening before this great effort; and he went over to me, from a very concise brief, the main topics of the speech, which he had prepared for the following day. So calm and unimpassioned was the memorandum, so entirely was he at ease himself, that I was tempted to think, absurdly enough, that he was not sufficiently aware of the magnitude of the occasion. But I soon perceived that his calmness was the repose of conscious power. He was not only at ease, but sportive and full of anecdote; and as he told the Senate playfully the next day, he slept soundly that night on the formidable assault of his gallant and accomplished adversary. So the great Condé slept on the eve of the battle of Rocroi; so Alexander slept on the eve of the battle of Arbela; and so they awoke to deeds of immortal fame. As I saw him in the evening (if I may borrow an illustration from his favorite amusement) he was as unconcerned and as free of spirit as some here have often seen him, while floating in his fishing-boat along a hazy shore, gently rocking on the tranquil tide, dropping his line here and there, with the varying fortune of the sport. The next morning he was like some mighty Admiral, dark and terrible, casting the long shadow of his frowning tiers far over the sea, that seemed to sink beneath him; his broad pennant streaming at the main, the stars and stripes at the fore, the mizzen, and the peak, and bearing down like a tempest upon his antagonist, with all his canvas strained to the wind, and all his thunders roaring from his broadsides.

AS A JURIST.

Mr. Webster's career was not less brilliant as a jurist than as a statesman. In fact, he possessed in an eminent degree a judicial mind. While performing an amount of congressional and official labor sufficient to fill the busiest day and to task the strongest powers, he yet sustained with a giant's strength the Herculean toils of his profession. At the very commencement of his legal studies, resisting the fascination of a more liberal course of reading, he laid his foundations deep in the common law; grappled as well as he might with the weary subtilties and obsolete technicalities of Coke Littleton, and abstracted and translated volumes of reports from the Norman-French and Latin. A few years of practice follow in the Courts of New Hampshire, interrupted by his service in Congress for two political terms, and we find him at the bar of the Supreme Court of the United States at Washington, in

augurating in the Dartmouth College case what may be called a new school of constitutional jurisprudence.

It would be a waste of time to speak of that great case, or of Mr. Webster's connection with it. It is too freshly remembered in our tribunals. So novel at that time were the principles involved in it, that a member of the Court, after a cursory inspection of the record of the case, expressed the opinion that little of importance could be urged in behalf of the plaintiff in error; but so firm is the basis on which in that and subsequent cases of a similar character those principles were established, that they form one of the best settled, as they are one of the most important, portions of the constitutional law of the Union.

Not less important, and, at the time, not less novel, were the principles involved in the celebrated case of Gibbons and Ogden. This case grew out of a grant by the State of New York to the assignees of Fulton of the exclusive right to navigate by steam the rivers, harbors, and bays of the Empire State. Twenty-five years afterward, Mr. Justice Wayne gave to Mr. Webster the credit of having laid down the broad constitutional ground on which the navigable waters of the United States, "every creek and river and lake and bay and harbor in the country," was forever rescued from the grasp of State monopoly. So failed the intention of the Legislature of New York to secure a rich pecuniary reward to the great perfecter of steam navigation; so must have failed any attempt to compensate by money the inestimable achievement. Monopolies could not reward it; silver and gold could not weigh down its value. Small services are paid with money; large ones with fame. Fulton had his reward when, after twenty years of unsuccessful experiment and hope deferred, he made the passage to Albany by steam; as Franklin had his reward when he saw the fibers of the cord which held his kite stiffening with the electricity they had drawn from the thunder-cloud; as Galileo had his when he pointed his little tube to the heavens and discovered the Medicean stars; as Columbus had his when he beheld from the deck of his vessel a moving light on the shores of his new-found world. That one glowing, unutterable thrill of conscious success is too exquisite to be alloyed with baser metal. The midnight vigils, the aching eyes, the fainting hopes turned at last into one bewildering ecstasy of triumph, can not be repaid with gold. The great discoveries, improvements, and inventions which benefit mankind can only be rewarded by opposition, obloquy, poverty, and an undying name!

Time would fail me, were I otherwise equal to the task, to dwell on the other great constitutional cases argued by Mr. Webster; those on State insolvent laws, the Bank of the United States, the Sailor's Snug Harbor, the Charlestown Bridge Franchise, or those other great cases on the validity of Mr. Girard's will, in which Mr. Webster's argument drew forth an emphatic acknowledgment from the citizens of Washington, of all denominations, for its great