down again and again in unforeseen and
heart-rending defeat. Yet he could say honorably: "If any one desires
to know the leading and paramount object of my public life, the
preservation of this union will furnish him the key." One could wish
that the speeches of this fascinating American were more readable today.
They seem thin, facile, full of phrases--such adroit phrases as would
catch the ear of a listening, applauding audience. Straight, hard
thinking was not the road to political preferment in Clay's day. Calhoun
had that power, as Lincoln had it. Webster had the capacity for it,
although he was too indolent to employ his great gifts steadily. Yet it
was Webster who analyzed kindly and a little sadly, for he was talking
during Clay's last illness and just before his own, his old rival's
defect in literary quality: "He was never a man of books.... I could
never imagine him sitting comfortably in his library and reading
quietly out of the great books of the past. He has been too fond of
excitement--he has lived upon it; he has been too fond of company,
not enough alone; and has had few resources within himself." Were
the limitations of a typical oratorical temperament ever touched more
unerringly than in these words?

When Webster himself thundered, at the close of his reply to Hayne in
1830, "Union AND Liberty, now and forever, one and inseparable," the
words sank deeper into the consciousness of the American people than any
similar sentiment uttered by Henry Clay. For Webster's was the richer,
fuller nature, nurtured by "the great books of the past," brooding,
as Lincoln was to brood later, over the seemingly insoluble problem
of preserving a union of States half slave, half free. On the fateful
seventh of March, 1850, Webster, like Clay, cast the immense weight of
his personality and prestige upon the side of compromise. It was the
ruin of his political fortune, for the mood of the North was changing,
and the South preferred other candidates for the Presidency. Yet the
worst that can fairly be said against that speech today is that it
lacked moral imagination to visualize, as Mrs. Stowe was soon to
visualize, the human results of slavery. As a plea for the transcendent
necessity of maintaining the old Union it was consistent with Webster's
whole development of political thought.

What were the secrets of that power that held Webster's hearers
literally spellbound, and made the North think of him, after that
alie