re, 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 the _extension_
of 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 pr