Later on
Webster, and a school of followers, of whom perhaps we may take "our
Elijah Pogram" to have been one, used ceremonial occasions, on which
Englishmen only suffer the speakers, for the purpose of inculcating their
patriotic doctrine, and Webster at least was doing good. His greatest
speech, upon an occasion to which we shall shortly come, was itself an
event. Lincoln found in it as inspiring a political treatise as many
Englishmen have discovered in the speeches and writings of Burke.

Henry Clay was a slighter but more attractive person. He was apparently
the first American public man whom his countrymen styled "magnetic," but
a sort of scheming instability caused him after one or two trials to be
set down as an "impossible" candidate for the Presidency. As a dashing
young man from the West he had the chief hand in forcing on the second
war with Great Britain, from 1812 to 1814, which arose out of perhaps
insufficient causes and ended in no clear result, but which, it is
probable, marked a stage in the growth of loyalty to America. As an
older man he was famed as an "architect of compromises," for though he
strove for emancipation in his own State, Kentucky, and dreamed of a
great scheme for colonising the slaves in Africa, he was supremely
anxious to avert collision between North and South, and in this respect
was typical of his generation. But about 1830 he was chiefly known as
the apostle of what was called the "American policy." This was a policy
which aimed at using the powers of the national Government for the
development of the boundless resources of the country. Its methods
comprised a national banking system, the use of the money of the Union on
great public works, and a protective tariff, which it was hoped might
chiefly operate to encourage promising but "infant" industries and to tax
the luxuries of the rich. Whatever may have been the merits of this
policy, which made some commotion for a few years, we can easily
understand that it appealed to the imagination of young Lincoln at a time
of keen political energy on his part of which we have but meagre details.

A third celebrity of this period, in his own locality a still more
powerful man, was John Caldwell Calhoun, of South Carolina. He enjoyed
beyond all his contemporaries the fame of an intellectual person.
Lincoln conceded high admiration to his concise and penetrating phrases.
An Englishwoman, Harriet Martineau, who knew him, has des