in the sentiment of
union. Jackson seemed to rise from the rough frontiersman to the
guardian of the nation when he gave the word, "The Federal Union--it
must be preserved!" Clay found the noblest exercise of his eloquence and
his diplomacy in evoking the national spirit and in harmonizing the
differences which threatened it. But the most stirring voice and
effective leadership was that of Daniel Webster.

As Webster is judged in the retrospect, we see that he was not so much a
statesman, still less a moral idealist, as an advocate. His lucidity of
statement and emotional power were not matched by constructive ability.
His name is associated with no great measure of administration, no large
and definite policy. He was luminous in statement rather than sagacious
in judgment, an advocate rather than a judge. On the platform or in the
Senate he was still pre-eminently the lawyer, in that, like a lawyer, he
was the representative and exponent of established interests,--not the
projector of new social adjustments. Civil law represents a vast
accumulated experience and tradition of mankind; it has been slowly
wrought out, as a regulation and adjustment of existing interests; with
an effort toward equity, as understood by the best intelligence of each
period, but always with immense regard for precedent and previous usage.
It was in this spirit, highly conservative of what has already been
secured, and extremely cautious toward radical change, that Webster
habitually dealt with political institutions. It was characteristic of
him that in the Massachusetts constitutional convention in 1820 he
pleaded strongly for the retention of the property qualification of
voters for State senators. But when the tide moved irresistibly toward
manhood suffrage, he acquiesced.

But conservative as he was by nature, he was in profound sympathy with a
sentiment which while rooted in the past was yet in the '20s and '30s a
young, plastic, growing idea,--the idea of American Union, indissoluble,
perpetual. No voice was so powerful as Webster's to fill the minds and
hearts of man with this lofty passion. His orations at Plymouth Rock, at
Bunker Hill, and upon the simultaneous deaths of Adams and Jefferson,
his vindication of the national idea against the localism of Hayne and
Calhoun,--were organ-voices of patriotism. They thrilled the souls of
those who listened; they went over the country and printed themselves on
the minds of men; school-boys d