atesmen 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
i