and put them down. And if
war were to happen, it was supposed that it would be brief. Even so
great and sagacious a statesman as Seward thought this. The South
thought that it could easily whip the Yankees; and the North thought
that it could suppress a Southern rebellion in six weeks. Both sides
miscalculated. And so, in spite of warnings, the nation drifted into
war; but as it turned out in the end it seems a providential event,
--the way God took to break up slavery, the root and source of all our
sectional animosities; a terrible but apparently necessary catastrophe,
since more than a million of brave men perished, and more than five
thousand millions of dollars were spent. Had the North been wise, it
would have compensated the South for its slaves. Had the South been
wise, it would have accepted the compensation and set them free, But it
was not to be. That issue could only be settled by the most terrible
contest of modern times.

I will not dwell on that war, which Webster predicted and dreaded. I
only wish to show that it was not for want of patriotism that he became
unpopular, but because he did not fall in with the prevailing passions
of the day, or with the public sentiment of the North in reference to
slavery, not as to its evils and wickedness, but as to the way in which
it was to be opposed. The great reforms of England, since the accession
of William III., have been effected by using constitutional means,--not
violence, not revolution, not war; but by an appeal to reason and
intelligence and justice. No reforms in any nation have been greater and
more glorious than those of the nineteenth century,--all effected by
constitutional methods. Mr. Webster vainly attempted constitutional
means. He was a lawyer. He reverenced the Constitution, with all its
compromises. He would observe the law of contracts. Yet no man in the
nation was more impatient than he at the threats of secession. He
foretold that secession would lead to war. And if Mr. Webster had lived
to see the war of which he had such anxious prescience, I firmly believe
that he would have marched under the banner of the North with patriotism
equal to any man. He would have been where Mr. Everett was. One of his
own sons was slain in that war. He was not a Northern man with Southern
principles; his whole life attested his Northern principles. There never
was a time when he was not hated and mistrusted by the Southern leaders.
It is not a proof that he