omise of 1820; he ridiculed
the idea that it was in the interest of peace; and he again referred
to the "higher law" that had characterised his speech in 1850. "The
slavery agitation you deprecate so much," he said in concluding, "is
an eternal struggle between conservatism and progress; between truth
and error; between right and wrong. You may sooner, by act of
Congress, compel the sea to suppress its upheavings, and the round
earth to extinguish its internal fires. You may legislate, and
abrogate, and abnegate, as you will, but there is a Superior Power
that overrules all; that overrules not only all your actions and all
your refusals to act, but all human events, to the distant but
inevitable result of the equal and universal liberty of all men."[436]

[Footnote 436: F.W. Seward, _Life of W.H. Seward_, Vol. 2, p. 221.]

Seward was not an orator. He could hardly be called an effective
speaker. He was neither impassioned nor always impressive; but when he
spoke he seemed to strike a blow that had in it the whole vigour and
strength of the public sentiment which he represented. So far as one
can judge from contemporary accounts he never spoke better than on
this occasion; or when it was more evident that he spoke with all the
sincere emotion of one whose mind and heart alike were filled with the
cause for which he pleaded. "Some happy spell," he wrote his wife,
"seemed to have come over me and to have enabled me to speak with more
freedom and ease than on any former occasion here."[437] Rhodes
suggests that Seward "could not conceal his exultation that the
Democrats had forsaken their high vantage ground and played into the
hands of their opponents."[438] He became almost dramatic when he
threw down his gauntlet at the feet of every member of the Senate in
1850 and challenged him to say that he knew, or thought, or dreamed,
that by enacting the compromise of 1850 he was directly or indirectly
abrogating, or in any degree impairing the Missouri Compromise. "If
it were not irreverent," he continued, "I would dare call up the
author of both the compromises in question, from his honoured, though
yet scarcely grass-covered grave, and challenge any advocate of this
measure to confront that imperious shade, and say that, in making the
compromise of 1850, Henry Clay intended or dreamed that he was
subverting or preparing the way for a subversion of his greater work
of 1820. Sir, if that spirit is yet lingering here over the sc