The and Rhode-Island are in the domestic slave-trade. millionnaires of Massachusetts own men in Virginia, Alabama, Missouri! The leading men in trade, in Church and State, think Justice is not much more needed in a statesman than it is needed in an ox, or in the steel which shoes his hoof! Remember these things, and pity Daniel Webster, ambitious, passionate, unthrifty; and see the circumstances which weighed him down. We judge the deeds: God only can judge the man. If you and I have not met the temptation which can overmaster us, let us have mercy on such as come bleeding from that battle. رو His calling as a lawyer was somewhat dangerous, leading him "to make the worse appear the better reason; to seek "not verity, but verisimilitude;" to look at the expedient end, not to inquire if his means be also just; to look too much at measures, not enough at principles. Yet his own brother Ezekiel went safely through that peril, -no smell of that fire on his garment. His intercourse with politicians was full of moral peril. How few touch politics, and are thenceforward clean! Boston now mourns for him! She is too late in her weeping. She should have wept her warning when her capitalists filled his right hand with bribes. She ought to have put on sackcloth when the speech of March 7th first came here. She should have hung her flags at halfmast when the Fugitive Slave Bill became a law; then she only fired cannons, and thanked her representative. Webster fell prostrate, but was Boston more innocent than he? Remember the nine hundred and eighty-seven men that thanked him for the speech which touched their "conscience," and pointed out the path of "duty"! It was she that ruined him. She bribed him in 1827, and often since. He regarded the sums thus paid as a retaining fee, and at the last maintained that the Boston manufacturers were still in his debt; for the services he had rendered them by defending the tariff in his place as Senator were to them worth more than all the money he received! Could a man be honest in such a position? Alas that the great orator had not the conscience to remember at first that man shall not live by bread alone! What a sad life was his! His wife died, -a loving woman, beautiful, and tenderly beloved! Of several children, all save one have gone before him to the tomb. Sad man, he lived to build his children's monument! Do you remember the melancholy spectacle in the street, when Major Webster, a victim of the Mexican war, was by his father laid down in yonder tomb ?-a daughter, too, but recently laid low! How poor seemed then the ghastly pageant in the street, empty and hollow as the muffled drum! What a sad face he wore,-furrowed by passion, by ambition, that noble brow scarred all over with the records of a hard, sad life. Look at the prints and pictures of him in the street. I do not wonder his early friends abhor the sight. It is a face of sorrows, private, public, secret woes. But there are pictures of that face in earlier full of power, but full of tenderness; the mouth feminine, and innocent as a girl's. What a life of passion, of dark sorrow, rolled betwixt the two! In that ambitionstricken face his mother would not have known her child! years, For years, to me, he has seemed like one of the tragic heroes of the Grecian tale, pursued by fate; and latterly, the saddest sight in all the Western World,-widowed of so much he loved, and grasping at what was not only vanity, but the saddest vexation of the heart. I have long mourned for him, as for no living or departed men. He blasted the friends of man with scornful lightning: him, if I could, I would not blast, but only bless continually and evermore. You remember the last time he spoke in Boston; the procession, last summer, you remember it well. What a sad and care-worn countenance was that of the old man, welcomed with the mockery of applause! You remember, when the orator, wise-headed and friendly-hearted, came to thank him for his services, he said not a word of “ saving the Union;" of the "compromise measures," not a word. That farce was played out it was only the tragic facts which were left; but for his great services he thanked him. No, And when Webster replied, he said, "Here in Boston I am not disowned; at least, here I am not disowned." Daniel Webster, you are not disowned in Boston. So long shall never as I have a tongue to teach, a heart to feel, you It was partly by Boston's sin that the great man fell! I pity his victims; you pity them too. But I pity him more, oh, far more! Pity the oppressed, will you? Will you not also pity the oppressor in his sin? Look there! See that face, so manly strong, so maiden meek! Hear that voice! "Neither do I condemn thee! Go, and sin no more!" Listen to the last words of the Crucified : "Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do." The last time he was in Faneuil Hall,-it was "Faneuil Hall open; it had been shut;-it was last Maythe sick old man-you remember the feeble look and the sad face, the tremulous voice. He came to solicit the vote of the Methodists,—a vain errand. I felt then that it was his last time, and forbore to look upon that saddened countenance. The last time he was in the Senate, it was to hear his successor speak. He stayed an hour, and heard Charles Sumner demonstrate that the Fugitive Slave Bill was not good religion, nor good Constitution, nor good law. The old and the new stood face to face, the Fugitive Slave Bill and Justice. What an hour! What a sight! What thoughts ran through the great man's mind, mingled with what regrets! For slavery never set well on him. It was a Nessus' shirt on our Hercules, and the poison of his own arrows rankled now in his own bones. Had Mr Webster been true to his history, true to his heart, true to his intention and his promises, he would himself have occupied that ground two years before. Then there would have been no Fugitive Slave Bill, no chain round the Court House, no man-stealing in Boston; but the "Defender of the Constitution," become the "Defender of the unalienable rights of man," would have been the President of the United States! But he had not the courage to deliver the speech he made. No man can serve two masters,―Justice and Ambition. The mill of God grinds slow but dreadful fine! He came home to Boston, and went down to Marshfield to die. An old man, broken with the storms of State, went home-to die! His neighbours came to ease the fall, to look upon the disappointment, and give him what cheer they could. To him to die was gain; life was the only loss. Yet he did not wish to die: he surrendered, -he did not yield. At the last end, his friends were about him; his dear ones-his wife, his son (the last of six children he had loved). Name by name he bade them all farewell, and all his friends, man by man. Two coloured servants of his ◄ were there,—whom, it is said, he had helped purchase out of slavery, and bless with freedom's life. They watched over the bedside of the dying man. The kindly doctor sought to sweeten the bitterness of death with medicated skill; and, when that failed, he gave the great man a little manna which fell down from heaven three thousand years ago, and shepherd David gathered up and kept it in a psalm: "The Lord is my Shepherd: though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me." And the great man faltered out his last words, “That is what I want-thy rod, thy rod; thy staff, thy staff." That heart had never wholly renounced its God. Oh, no! it had scoffed at His "Higher Law;" but, in the heart of hearts, there was religious feeling still! Just four years after his great speech, on the 24th of October, all that was mortal of Daniel Webster went down to the dust, and the soul to the motherly bosom of God! Men mourn for him: he heeds it not. The great man has gone where the servant is free from his master, where the weary are at rest, where the wicked cease from troubling. "No further seek his merits to disclose, Or draw his frailties from their dread abode ; Has Massachusetts has lost her great adopted son. lost? Oh, no! "I still live" is truer than the sick man knew : "He lives and spreads aloft by those pure eyes His memory will long live with us, still dear to many a loving heart. What honour shall we pay? Let the State go out mindful of his noblest services, yet tearful for his fall; sad that he would fain have filled him with the husks the swine do eat, and no man gave to him. Sad and tearful, let her remember the force of circumstances, and dark temptation's secret power. Let her remember that while we know what he yielded to, and what is sin, God knows what also is resisted, and HE alone knows who the sinner is. Massachusetts, the dear old mother of us all! let her warn her children to fling away ambition, and let her charge them, every one, that there is a God who must indeed be worshipped, and a Higher Law which must be kept, though Gold and Union fail. Then let her say to them, "Ye have dwelt long enough in this mountain; turn ye, and take your journey into the land of FREEDOM, which the Lord your God giveth you!" Then let her lift her eyes to Heaven, and pray : But "Sweet Mercy! to the gates of heaven And memory of earth's bitter leaven, "why to him confine the prayer, With all that live? The best of what we do and are, BUCKLE'S HISTORY OF CIVILIZATION. History of Civilization in England. By HENRY THOMAS BUCKLE. Vol. I. London: 1857. 8vo. pp. xxiv, 854. The THIS is the most important work, in its line, from a British hand, which the world has seen for many a year. theme is one of the greatest in the world. The author has treated it better, with more learning and profound comprehension, than any of his English predecessors. |