Select Speeches of Daniel Webster | Page 2

contemplated as a
companion volume. The present edition represents Webster in the
various and distinct fields in which his genius manifested itself so
powerfully and so nobly. He is here seen before a jury, 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