Select Speeches of Daniel Webster | Page 2

before the Supreme Court of the United States, on a great historical occasion, in the Senate of the United States, in a great national canvass, and as a eulogist.
Had it not been for making the volume too large for school use I should have included the famous speech delivered in the Senate on the 7th of March, 1850. This speech has been considered by many as the vulnus immedicabile of Mr. Webster's political life; it is certain that for it he was most rankly abused. "Massachusetts," as Hon. John D. Long has said, "smote and broke the heart of Webster, her idol, and then broke her own above his grave, and to-day writes his name highest upon her roll of statesmen."
I find in this speech nothing but what is consistent with Mr. Webster's noble adherence to the Constitution and the Union; nothing but what is consistent with the solemn duty of a great man in a great national crisis.
In his address at Buffalo on the 22d of May, 1851, he expressed himself very freely in regard to this speech, saying: "I felt that I had a duty to perform to my country, to my own reputation; for I flattered myself that a service of forty years had given me some character, on which I had a right to repose for my justification in the performance of a duty attended with some degree of local unpopularity. I thought it was my duty to pursue this course, and I did not care what was to be the consequence. And, Gentlemen, allow me to say here to-day, that if the fate of John Rogers had stared me in the face, if I had seen the stake, if I had heard the fagots already crackling, by the blessing of Almighty God I would have gone on and discharged the duty which I thought my country called upon me to perform."
Does this seem the language of one who had abandoned his post and was merely "bidding for the Presidency"?
The address of Hon. Rufus Choate, before the students of Dartmouth College, commemorative of Daniel Webster, has a remark on this subject so just that I cannot refrain from quoting it. He says: "Until the accuser who charges Mr. Webster with having 'sinned against his conscience' will assert that the conscience of a public man may not, must not, be instructed by profound knowledge of the vast subject-matter with which public life is conversant, and will assert that he is certain that the consummate science of our great statesman was felt by himself to prescribe to his morality another conduct than that which he adopted, and that he thus consciously outraged that 'sense of duty which pursues us ever,'--is he not inexcusable, whoever he is, that so judges another?"
At the meeting held in Faneuil Hall, Oct. 27, 1852, commemorative of Mr. Webster's life and work, Mr. Edward Everett said: "Whoever, in after time, shall write the history of the United States for the last forty years will write the life of Daniel Webster; and whoever writes the life of Daniel Webster as it ought to be written will write the history of the Union from the time he took a leading part in its concerns." Mr. Choate, at a meeting of the Supreme Court of Massachusetts, Oct. 25, 1852, said: "Happier than the younger Pliny, happier than Cicero, he has found his historian, unsolicited, in his lifetime, and his countrymen have him all by heart."
If this volume shall aid in bringing the young of this generation "to have him all by heart," to ascend his imaginative heights and sit under the shadow of his profound reflections on that which is fundamental in civil and religious liberty, its purpose will be accomplished.
With few exceptions these selections are given entire. Whenever they have been abridged, the continuity of the discourse has not been impaired.
In the matter of annotation the purpose has been to furnish sufficient aid to the general reader, and at the same time to indicate to the special student lines along which he may study the speeches.
In Edward Everett's Memoir, found in the first volume of Mr. Webster's works; in the life of Mr. Webster by George Tichnor Curtis, and in Henry Cabot Lodge's _Daniel Webster_, in the American Statesman Series, the student has exhaustive, scholarly, and judicious estimates of Mr. Webster's work.
I am indebted to the Hon. George F. Hoar and the Hon. Edward J. Phelps for assistance in the task of selecting representative speeches; and to the former for permission to associate his name with this edition of Mr. Webster's work.
A. J. G.
Brookline, November, 1892.

Introduction.

Mr. Webster approaches as nearly to the beau ideal of a republican Senator as any man that I have ever seen in the course of my life; worthy of Rome or