ers of secession were overthrown in a contest which they
courted, and in which they expected victory. His reply to Hayne is,
perhaps, the most masterly speech in American political history. It is
one of the immortal orations of the world, extorting praise and
admiration from Americans and foreigners alike. In his various
encounters with Hayne, McDuffee, and Calhoun, he taught the principles
of political union to the rising generation. He produced those
convictions which sustained the North in its subsequent contest to
preserve the integrity of the Nation. There can be no estimate of the
services he rendered to the country by those grand and patriotic
efforts. But for these, the people might have succumbed to the
sophistries of Calhoun; for he was almost as great a giant as Webster,
and was more faultless in his private life. He had an immense influence;
he ruled the whole South; he made it solid. The speeches of Webster in
the Senate made him the oracle of the North. He was not only the great
champion of the North, and of Northern interests, but he was the teacher
of the whole country. He expounded the principles of the
Constitution,--that this great country is one, to be forever united in
all its parts; that its stars and stripes were to float over every city
and fortress in the land, from the Atlantic to the Pacific, from the
river St. Lawrence to the Gulf of Mexico, and "bearing for their motto
no such miserable interrogatory as, What are all these worth? nor those
other words of delusion and folly, Liberty first and Union afterwards;
but that other sentiment, dear to every American heart, Liberty and
Union, now and forever, one and inseparable!"

It was after his memorable speech in reply to Hayne that I saw Webster
for the first time. I was a boy in college, and he had come to visit it;
and well do I remember the unbounded admiration, yea, the veneration,
felt for him by every young man in that college and throughout the
town,--indeed, throughout the whole North, for he was the pride and
glory of the land. It was then that they called him godlike, looking
like an Olympian statue, or one of the creations of Michael Angelo when
he wished to represent majesty and dignity and power in repose,--the
most commanding human presence ever seen in the Capitol at Washington.

When we recall those patriotic and noble speeches which were read and
admired by every merchant and farmer and lawyer in the country, and by
which he pr