condensing, as it does, all which
such histories can tell us in a few smiting sentences. "Spain," he says,
"stooped on South America, like a vulture on its prey. Every thing was
force. Territories were acquired by fire and sword. Cities were
destroyed by fire and sword. Hundreds of thousands of human beings fell
by fire and sword. Even conversion to Christianity was attempted by fire
and sword." One is reminded, in this passage, of Macaulay's method of
giving vividness to his confident generalization of facts by emphatic
repetitions of the same form of words. The repetition of "fire and
sword," in this series of short, sharp sentences, ends in forcing the
reality of what the words mean on the dullest imagination; and the
climax is capped by affirming that "fire and sword" were the means by
which the religion of peace was recommended to idolaters, whose
heathenism was more benignant, and more intrinsically Christian, than
the military Christianity which was forced upon them.

And then, again, how easily Webster's imagination slips in, at the end
of a comparatively bald enumeration of the benefits of a good
government, to vitalize the statements of his understanding!
"Everywhere," he says, "there is order, everywhere there is security.
Everywhere the law reaches to the highest, and reaches to the lowest, to
protect all in their rights, and to restrain all from wrong; and over
all hovers liberty,--that liberty for which our fathers fought and fell
on this very spot, with her eye ever watchful, and her eagle wing ever
wide outspread." There is something astonishing in the dignity given in
the last clause of this sentence to the American eagle,--a bird so
degraded by the rhodomontade of fifth-rate declaimers, that it seemed
impossible that the highest genius and patriotism could restore it to
its primacy among the inhabitants of the air, and its just eminence as a
symbol of American liberty. It is also to be noted, that Webster here
alludes to "the bird of freedom" only as it appears on the American
silver dollar that passes daily from hand to hand, where the watchful
eye and the outspread wing are so inartistically represented that the
critic is puzzled to account for the grandeur of the image which the
orator contrived to evolve from the barbaric picture on the ugliest and
clumsiest of civilized coins.

The compactness of Webster's statements occasionally reminds us of the
epigrammatic point which characterizes so many of