d has erected our great Consolidated
Government. Can it be necessary for me to show what must be the
inevitable consequences?... It was clearly foreseen and foretold on the
formation of the Constitution what these consequences would be. All the
calamities we have experienced, and those which are yet to come, are the
result of the consolidating tendency of this government; and unless this
tendency be arrested, all that has been foretold will certainly befall
us,--even to the pouring out of the last vial of wrath, military
despotism."

That was what Mr. Calhoun feared,--that the consolidation of a central
power would be fatal to the liberties of the country and the rights of
the States, and would introduce a system of spoils and the reign of
demagogues, all in subserviency to a mere military chieftain, utterly
unfit to guide the nation in its complicated interests. But his gloomy
predictions fortunately were not fulfilled, in spite of all the misrule
and obstinacy of the man he intensely distrusted and disliked. The
tendency has been to usurpations by Congress rather than by the
Executive.

It is impossible not to admire the lofty tone, free from personal
animus, which is seen in all Calhoun's speeches. They may have been
sophistical, but they appealed purely to the intellect of those whom he
addressed, without the rhetoric of his great antagonists. His speeches
are compact arguments, such as one would address to the Supreme Court on
his side of the question.

Thus far his speeches in the Senate had been in reference to economic
theories and legislation antagonistic to the interests of the South, and
the usurpations of executive power, which threatened directly the rights
of independent States, and indirectly the liberties of the people and
the political degradation of the nation; but now new issues arose from
the agitation of the slavery question, and his fame chiefly rests on his
persistent efforts to suppress this agitation, as logically leading to
the dissolution of the Union and the destruction of the institution
with which its prosperity was supposed to be identified.

The early Abolitionists, as I remember them, were, as a body, of very
little social or political influence. They were earnest, clear-headed,
and uncompromising in denouncing slavery as a great moral evil, indeed
as a sin, disgraceful to a free people, and hostile alike to morality
and civilization. But in the general apathy as to an institution wi