ation of tone and statement. Everybody old
enough to recollect the singular virulence of political speech at that
period must remember it as disgraceful equally to the national
conscience and the national understanding. The spirit of party, always
sufficiently fierce and unreasonable, was then stimulated into a fury
resembling madness. Almost every speaker, Democrat or Whig, was in that
state of passion which is represented by the physical sign of "foaming
at the mouth." Few mouths then opened that did not immediately begin to
"foam." So many fortunes were suddenly wrecked by President Jackson's
financial policy, and the business of the country was so disastrously
disturbed, that, whether the policy was right or wrong, those who
assailed and those who defended it seemed to be equally devoid of common
intellectual honesty. "I do well to be angry," appears to have been the
maxim which inspired Democratic and Whig orators alike; and what reason
there was on either side was submerged in the lies and libels, in the
calumnies and caricatures, in the defamations and execrations, which
accompanied the citation of facts and the affirmation of principles.
Webster, during all this time, was selected as a shining mark, at which
every puny writer or speaker who opposed him hurled his small or large
contribution of verbal rotten eggs; and yet Webster was almost the only
Whig statesman who preserved sanity of understanding during the whole
progress of that political riot, in which the passions of men became the
masters of their understandings. Pious Whig fathers, who worshipped the
"godlike Daniel," went almost to the extent of teaching their children
to curse Jackson in their prayers; equally pious Democratic fathers
brought up their sons and daughters to anathematize the fiend-like
Daniel as the enemy of human rights; and yet, in reading Webster's
speeches, covering the whole space between 1832 and 1836, we can hardly
find a statement which an historian of our day would not admit as a
candid generalization of facts, or an argument which would not stand the
test of logical examination. Such an historian might entirely disagree
with the opinions of Webster; but he would certainly award to him the
praise of being an honest reasoner and an honest rhetorician, in a time
when reason was used merely as a tool of party passion, and when
rhetoric rushed madly into the worst excesses of rhodomontade.

It is also to be said that Webster rarely