akes, we should bear in mind
the palliating circumstances.

Calhoun was the incarnation of Southern public opinion,--bigoted,
narrow, prejudiced, but intense in its delusions and loyal to its
dogmas. Hence he enslaved others as he was himself enslaved. He was
alike the idol and the leader of his State, impossible to be dethroned,
as Webster was with the people of Massachusetts until he misrepresented
their convictions. The consistency of his career was marvellous,--not
that he did not change some of his opinions, for there is no
intellectual progress to a man who does not. How can a young man,
however gifted, be infallible? But whatever the changes through which
his mind passed, they did not result from self-interest or ambition, but
were the result of more enlightened views and enlarged experience.
Political wisdom is not a natural instinct, but a progressive growth,
like that of Burke,--the profoundest of all the intellects of his
generation.

Calhoun made several great speeches in the Senate of the United States,
besides those in reference to a banking system connected with the
government, which, whether wise or erroneous, contained some important
truths. But the logical deduction of them all may be summed up in one
idea,--the supremacy of State rights in opposition to a central
government. This, from the time when the diverging interests of the
North and the South made him feel the dangers in "the unchecked will of
a majority of the whole," was the dogma of his life, from which he
never swerved, and which he pursued to all its legitimate conclusions.
Whatever measure tended to the consolidation of central power, whether
in reference to the encroachments of the Executive or the usurpations of
Congress, he denounced with terrible earnestness and sometimes with
great eloquence. This is the key to the significant portion of his
political career.

In his speech on the Force Bill, in 1834, he says:

"If we now raise our eyes and direct them towards that once beautiful
system, with all its various, separate, and independent parts blended
into one harmonious whole, we must be struck with the mighty change! All
have disappeared, gone,--absorbed, concentrated, and consolidated in
this government, which is left alone in the midst of the desolation of
the system, the sole and unrestricted representative of an absolute and
despotic majority.... In the place of their admirably contrived system,
the act proposed to be repeale