which he discriminated between the kind of reasoning proper to be
employed when he addressed courts and juries, and the kind of reasoning
which is most effective in a legislative assembly. The lawyer and the
statesman were, in Webster, kept distinct, except so far as he was a
lawyer who had argued before the Supreme Court questions of
constitutional law. An amusing instance of this abnegation of the
lawyer, while incidentally bringing in a lawyer's knowledge of judicial
decisions, occurs in a little episode in his debate with Mr. Calhoun, in
1849, as to the relation of Congress to the Territories. Mr. Calhoun
said that he had been told that the Supreme Court of the United States
had decided, in _one_ case, that the Constitution did not extend to the
Territories, but that he was "incredulous of the fact." "Oh!" replied
Mr. Webster, "I can remove the gentleman's incredulity very easily, for
I can assure him that the same thing has been decided by the United
States courts over and over again for the last thirty years." It will be
observed, however, that Mr. Webster, after communicating this important
item of information, proceeded to discuss the question as if the Supreme
Court had no existence, and bases his argument on the plain terms of the
Constitution, and the plain facts recorded in the history of the
government established by it.
Macaulay, in his lively way, has shown the difficulty of manufacturing
English statesmen out of English lawyers, though, as lawyers, their rank
in the profession may be very high. "Their arguments," he says, "are
intellectual prodigies, abounding with the happiest analogies and the
most refined distinctions. The principles of their arbitrary science
being once admitted, the statute-books and the reports being once
assumed as the foundations of reasoning, these men must be allowed to be
perfect masters of logic. But if a question arises as to the postulates
on which their whole system rests, if they are called upon to vindicate
the fundamental maxims of that system which they have passed their lives
in studying, these very men often talk the language of savages or of
children. Those who have listened to a man of this class in his own
court, and who have witnessed the skill with which he analyzes and
digests a vast mass of evidence, or reconciles a crowd of precedents
which at first sight seem contradictory, scarcely know him again when, a
few hours later, they hear him speaking on the other side of Westminster
Hall in his capacity of legislator. They can scarcely believe that the
paltry quirks which are faintly heard through a storm of coughing, and
which do not impose on the plainest country gentleman, can proceed from
the same sharp and vigorous intellect which had excited their admiration
under the same roof, and on the same day." And to this keen distinction
between an English lawyer, and an English lawyer as a member of the
House of Commons, may be added the peculiar kind of sturdy manliness
which is demanded in any person who aims to take a leading part in
Parliamentary debates. Erskine, probably the greatest advocate who ever
appeared in the English courts of law, made but a comparatively poor
figure in the House of Commons, as a member of the Whig opposition. "The
truth is, Erskine," Sheridan once said to him, "you are afraid of Pitt,
and that is the flabby part of your character."
But Macaulay, in another article, makes a point against the leaders of
party themselves. His definition of Parliamentary government is
"government by speaking"; and he declares that the most effective
speakers are commonly ill-informed, shallow in thought, devoid of large
ideas of legislation, hazarding the loosest speculations with the utmost
intellectual impudence, and depending for success on volubility of
speech, rather than on accuracy of knowledge or penetration of
intelligence. "The tendency of institutions like those of England," he
adds, "is to encourage readiness in public men, at the expense both of
fulness and of exactness. The keenest and most vigorous minds of every
generation, minds often admirably fitted for the investigation of truth,
are habitually employed in producing arguments such as no man of sense
would ever put into a treatise intended for publication, arguments which
are just good enough to be used once, when aided by fluent delivery and
pointed language." And he despairingly closes with the remark, that he
"would sooner expect a great original work on political science, such a
work, for example, as the Wealth of Nations, from an apothecary in a
country town, or from a minister in the Hebrides, than from a statesman
who, ever since he was one-and-twenty, had been a distinguished debater
in the House of Commons."
Now it is plain that neither of these contemptuous judgments applies to
Webster. He was a great lawyer; but as a legislator the precedents of
the lawyer did not control the action or supersede the principles of the
statesman. He was one of the most formidable debaters that ever appeared
in a legislative assembly; and yet those who most resolutely grappled
with him in the duel of debate would be the last to impute to him
inaccuracy of knowledge or shallowness of thought. He carried into the
Senate of the United States a trained mind, disciplined by the sternest
culture of his faculties, disdaining any plaudits which were not the
honest reward of robust reasoning on generalized facts, and
"gravitating" in the direction of truth, whether he hit or missed it. In
his case, at least, there was nothing in his legal experience, or in his
legislative experience, which would have unfitted him for producing a
work on the science of politics. The best speeches in the House of
Commons of Lord Palmerston and Lord John Russell appear very weak
indeed, as compared with the Reply to Hayne, or the speech on "The
Constitution not a Compact between Sovereign States," or the speech on
the President's Protest.
In this connection it may be said, when we remember the hot contests
between the two men, that there is something plaintive in Calhoun's
dying testimony to Webster's austere intellectual conscientiousness. Mr.
Venables, who attended the South Carolina statesman in his dying hours,
wrote to Webster: "When your name was mentioned he remarked that 'Mr.
Webster has as high a standard of truth as any statesman I have met in
debate. Convince him, and he cannot reply; he is silenced; he cannot
look truth in the face and oppose it by argument. I think that it can be
readily perceived by his manner when he felt the unanswerable force of a
reply.' He often spoke of you in my presence, and always kindly and most
respectfully." Now it must be considered that, in debate, the minds of
Webster and Calhoun had come into actual contact and collision. Each
really felt the force of the other. An ordinary duel might be ranked
among idle pastimes when compared with the stress and strain and pain of
their encounters in the duel of debate. A sword-cut or pistol-bullet,
maiming the body, was as nothing in comparison with the wounds they
mutually inflicted on that substance which was immortal in both. It was
a duel, or series of duels, in which mind was opposed to mind, and will
to will, and where the object appeared to be to inflict moral and mental
annihilation on one of the combatants. There never passed a word between
them on which the most ingenious Southern jurists, in their
interpretations of the "code" of honor, could have found matter for a
personal quarrel; and yet these two proud and strong personalities knew
that they were engaged in a mortal contest, in which neither gave
quarter nor expected quarter. Mr. Calhoun's intellectual egotism was as
great as his intellectual ability. He always supposed that he was the
victor in every close logical wrestle with any mind to which his own was
opposed. He never wrestled with a mind, until he met Webster's, which in
tenacity, grasp, and power was a match for his own. He, of course,
thought his antagonist was beaten by his superior strength and amplitude
of argumentation; but it is still to be noted that he, the most
redoubtable opponent that Webster ever encountered, testified, though in
equivocal terms, to Webster's intellectual honesty. When he crept, half
dead, into the Senate-Chamber to hear Webster's speech of the 7th of
March, 1850, he objected emphatically at the end to Webster's
declaration that the Union could not be dissolved. After declaring that
Calhoun's supposed case of justifiable resistance came within the
definition of the ultimate right of revolution, which is lodged in all
oppressed communities, Webster added that he did not at that time wish
to go into a discussion of the nature of the United States government.
"The honorable gentleman and myself," he said, "have broken lances
sufficiently often before on that subject." "I have no desire to do it
now," replied Calhoun; and Webster blandly retorted, "I presume the
gentleman has not, and I have quite as little." One is reminded here of
Dr. Johnson's remark, when he was stretched on a sick-bed, with his
gladiatorial powers of argument suspended by physical exhaustion. "If
that fellow Burke were now present," the Doctor humorously murmured, "he
would certainly kill me."
But to Webster's eminence as a lawyer and a statesman, it is proper to
add, that he has never been excelled as a writer of state papers among
the public men of the United States. Mr. Emerson has a phrase which is
exactly applicable to these efforts of Webster's mind. That phrase is,
"superb propriety." Throughout his despatches, he always seems to feel
that he impersonates his country; and the gravity and weight of his
style are as admirable as its simplicity and majestic ease. "Daniel
Webster, his mark," is indelibly stamped on them all. When the Treaty of
Washington was criticised by the Whigs in the English Parliament,
Macaulay specially noticed the difference in the style of the two
negotiators. Lord Ashburton, he said, had compromised the honor of his
country by "the humble, caressing, wheedling tone" of his letters, a
tone which contrasted strangely with "the firm, resolute, vigilant, and
unyielding manner" of the American Secretary of State. It is to be
noticed that no other opponent of Sir Robert Peel's administration, not
even Lord Palmerston and Lord John Russell, struck at the essential
weakness of Lord Ashburton's despatches with the force and sagacity
which characterized Macaulay's assault on the treaty. Indeed, a
rhetorician and critic less skilful than Macaulay can easily detect that
"America" is represented fully in Webster's despatches, while
"Britannia" has a very amiable, but not very forcible, representative in
Lord Ashburton. Had Palmerston been the British plenipotentiary, we can
easily imagine how different would have been the task imposed on
Webster. As the American Secretary was generally in the right in every
position he assumed, he would probably have triumphed even over
Palmerston; but the letters of the "pluckiest" of English statesmen
would, we may be sure, have never been criticised in the House of
Commons as "humble, wheedling, and caressing."
In addition, however, to his legal arguments, his senatorial speeches,
and his state papers, Webster is to be considered as the greatest orator
our country has produced in his addresses before miscellaneous
assemblages of the people. In saying this we do not confine the remark
to such noble orations as those on the "First Settlement of New
England," "The Bunker Hill Monument," and "Adams and Jefferson," but
extend it so as to include speeches before great masses of people who
could be hardly distinguished from a mob, and who were under no
restraint but that imposed by their own self-respect and their respect
for the orator. On these occasions he was uniformly successful. It is
impossible to detect, in any reports of these popular addresses, that he
ever stooped to employ a style of speech or mode of argument commonly
supposed appropriate to a speaker on the "stump"; and yet he was the
greatest "stump" orator that our country has ever seen. He seemed to
delight in addressing five, or ten, or even twenty thousand people, in
the open air, trusting that the penetrating tones of his voice would
reach even the ears of those who were on the ragged edges of the swaying
crowd before him; and he would thus speak to the sovereign people, in
their unorganized state as a collection of uneasy and somewhat
belligerent individuals, with a dignity and majesty similar to the
dignity and majesty which characterized his arguments before the Senate
of the United States, or before a bench of judges. A large portion of
his published works consist of such speeches, and they rank only second
among the remarkable productions of his mind.
The question arises, How could he hold the attention of such audiences
without condescending to flatter their prejudices, or without
occasionally acting the part of the sophist and the buffoon? Much may be
said, in accounting for this phenomenon, about his widely extended
reputation, his imposing presence, the vulgar curiosity to see a man
whom even the smallest country newspaper thought of sufficient
importance to defame, his power of giving vitality to simple words which
the most ignorant of his auditors could easily understand, and the
instinctive respect which the rudest kind of men feel for a grand
specimen of robust manhood. But the real, the substantial source of his
power over such audiences proceeded from his respect for _them_; and
their respect for him was more or less consciously founded on the
perception of this fact.
Indeed, a close scrutiny of his speeches will show how conscientiously
he regards the rights of other minds, however inferior they may be to
his own; and this virtue, for it is a virtue, is never more apparent
than in his arguments and appeals addressed to popular assemblies. No
working-man, whether farmer, mechanic, factory "hand," or day-laborer,
ever deemed himself insulted by a word from the lips of Daniel Webster;
he felt himself rather exalted in his own esteem, for the time, by
coming in contact with that beneficent and comprehensive intelligence,
which cherished among its favorite ideas a scheme for lifting up the
American laborer to a height of comfort and respectability which the
European laborer could hardly hope to attain. Prominent politicians, men
of wealth and influence, statesmen of high social and political rank,
may, at times, have considered Webster as arrogant and bad-tempered, and
may, at times, have felt disposed to fasten a quarrel upon him; even in
Massachusetts this disposition broke out in conventions of the party to
which he belonged; but it would be in vain to find a single
laboring-man, whether he met Webster in private, or half pushed and half
fought his way into a mass meeting, in order to get his ears into
communication with the orator's voice, who ever heard a word from him
which did not exalt the dignity of labor, or which was not full of
sympathy for the laborer's occasional sorrows and privations. Webster
seemed to have ever present to his mind the poverty of the humble home
of his youth. His father, his brothers, he himself, had all been brought
up to consider manual toil a dignified occupation, and as consistent
with the exercise of all the virtues which flourish under the domestic
roof. More than this, it may be said that, with the exception of a few
intimate friends, his sympathies to the last were most warmly with
common laborers. Indeed, if we closely study the private correspondence
of this statesman, who was necessarily brought into relations, more or
less friendly, with the conventionally great men of the world, European
as well as American, we shall find that, after all, he took more real
interest in Seth Peterson, and John Taylor, and Porter Wright, men
connected with him in fishing and farming, than he did in the
ambassadors of foreign states whom he met as Senator or as Secretary of
State, or in all the members of the polite society of Washington, New
York, and Boston. He was very near to Nature himself; and the nearer a
man was to Nature, the more he esteemed him. Thus persons who
superintended his farms and cattle, or who pulled an oar in his boat
when he ventured out in search of cod and halibut, thought "Squire
Webster" a man who realized their ideal and perfection of
good-fellowship while it may confidently be said that many of his
closest friends among men of culture, including lawyers, men of letters,
and statesmen of the first rank, must have occasionally resented the
"anfractuosities" of his mood and temper. But Seth Peterson, and Porter
Wright, and John Taylor, never complained of these "anfractuosities."
Webster, in fact, is one of the few public men of the country in whose
championship of the rights and sympathy with the wrongs of labor there
is not the slightest trace of the arts of the demagogue; and in this
fact we may find the reason why even the "roughs," who are present in
every mass meeting, always treated him with respect. Perhaps it would
not be out of place to remark here, that, in his Speech of the 7th of
March, he missed a grand opportunity to vindicate Northern labor, in the
reference he made to a foolish tirade of a Senator from Louisiana, who
"took pains to run a contrast between the slaves of the South and the
laboring people of the North, giving the preference, in all points of
condition, of comfort, and happiness, to the slaves of the South."
Webster made a complete reply to this aspersion on Northern labor; but,
as his purpose was to conciliate, he did not blast the libeller by
quoting the most eminent example that could be named demonstrating the
falsehood of the slave-holding Senator's assertion. Without deviating
from the conciliatory attitude he had assumed, one could easily imagine
him as lifting his large frame to its full height, flashing from his
rebuking eyes a glance of scorn at the "amiable Senator," and simply
saying, "_I_ belong to the class which the Senator from Louisiana
stigmatizes as more degraded than the slaves of the South." There was
not at the time any Senator from the South, except Mr. Calhoun, that the
most prejudiced Southern man would have thought of comparing with
Webster in respect to intellectual eminence; and, if Webster had then
and there placed himself squarely on his position as the son of a
Northern laborer, we should have been spared all the rhetoric about
Northern "mud-sills," with which the Senate was afterwards afflicted.
Webster was our man of men; and it would seem that he should have
crushed such talk at the outset, by proudly assuming that Northern labor
was embodied and impersonated in him,--that HE had sprung from its
ranks, and was proud of his ancestry.
An ingenious and powerful, but paradoxical thinker, once told me that I
was mistaken in calling Jonathan Edwards and Daniel Webster great
reasoners. "They were bad reasoners," he added, "but great poets."
Without questioning the right of the author of "An Enquiry into the
Modern Prevailing Notion of that Freedom of the Will, which is supposed
to be Essential to Moral Agency," to be ranked among the most eminent of
modern logicians, I could still understand why he was classed among
poets; for whether Edwards paints the torments of hell or the bliss of
heaven, his imagination almost rivals that of Dante in intensity of
realization. But it was at first puzzling to comprehend why Webster
should be depressed as a reasoner in order to be exalted as a poet. The
images and metaphors scattered over his speeches are so evidently
brought in to illustrate and enforce his statements and arguments, that,
grand as they often are, the imagination displayed in them is still a
faculty strictly subsidiary to the reasoning power. It was only after
reflecting patiently for some time on the seeming paradox that I caught
a glimpse of my friend's meaning; and it led me at once to consider an
entirely novel question, not heretofore mooted by any of Webster's
critics, whether friendly or unfriendly, in their endeavors to explain
the reason of his influence over the best minds of the generation to
which he belonged. In declaring that, as a poet, he far exceeded any
capacity he evinced as a reasoner, my paradoxical friend must have meant
that Webster had the poet's power of so _organizing_ a speech, that it
stood out to the eye of the mind as a palpable intellectual product and
fact, possessing, not merely that vague reality which comes from
erecting a plausible mental structure of deductive argumentation, based
on strictly limited premises, but a positive reality, akin to the
products of Nature herself, when she tries her hand in constructing a
ledge of rocks or rearing a chain of hills.
In illustration, it may be well to cite the example of poets with whom
Webster, of course, cannot be compared. Among the great mental facts,
palpable to the eyes of all men interested in literature, are such
creations as the Iliad, the Divine Comedy, the great Shakspearian
dramas, the Paradise Lost, and Faust. The commentaries and criticisms on
these are numerous enough to occupy the shelves of a large library; some
of them attempt to show that Homer, Dante, Shakspeare, Milton, and
Goethe were all wrong in their methods of creation; but they still
cannot obscure, to ordinary vision, the lustre of these luminaries as
they placidly shine in the intellectual firmament, which is literally
_over_ our heads. They are as palpable, to the eye of the mind, as
Sirius, Arcturus, the Southern Cross, and the planets Venus, Mars,
Jupiter, and Saturn, are to the bodily sense. M. Taine has recently
assailed the Paradise Lost with the happiest of French epigrams; he
tries to prove that, in construction, it is the most ridiculously
inartistic monstrosity that the imagination of a great mind ever framed
out of chaos; but, after we have thoroughly enjoyed the play of his wit,
there the Paradise Lost remains, an undisturbed object in the
intellectual heavens, disdaining to justify its right to exist on any
other grounds than the mere fact of its existence; and, certainly, not
more ridiculous than Saturn himself, as we look at him through a great
equatorial telescope, swinging through space encumbered with his clumsy
ring, and his wrangling family of satellites, but still, in spite of
peculiarities on which M. Taine might exercise his wit until doomsday,
one of the most beautiful and sublime objects which the astronomer can
behold in the whole phenomena of the heavens.
Indeed, in reading criticisms on such durable poetic creations and
organizations as we have named, one is reminded of Sydney Smith's
delicious chaffing of his friend Jeffrey, on account of Jeffrey's
sensitiveness of literary taste, and his inward rage that events, men,
and books, outside of him, do not correspond to the exacting rules which
are the products of his own subjective and somewhat peevish
intelligence. "I like," says Sydney, "to tell you these things, because
you never do so well as when you are humbled and frightened, and, if
_you could be alarmed into the semblance of modesty_, you would charm
everybody; but remember my joke against you about the moon: 'D--n the
solar system! bad light--planets too distant--pestered with
comets--feeble contrivance; could make a better with great ease.'"
Now when a man, in whatever department or direction of thought his
activity is engaged, succeeds in organizing, or even welding together,
the materials on which he works, so that the product, as a whole, is
_visible_ to the mental eye, as a new creation or construction, he has
an immense advantage over all critics of his performance. Refined
reasonings are impotent to overthrow it; epigrams glance off from it, as
rifle-bullets rebound when aimed at a granite wall; and it stands erect
long after the reasonings and the epigrams are forgotten. Even when its
symmetry is destroyed by a long and destructive siege, a pile of stones
still remains, as at Fort Sumter, to attest what power of resistance it
opposed to all the resources of modern artillery.
If we look at Webster's greatest speeches, as, for instance, "The Reply
to Hayne," "The Constitution not a Compact between Sovereign States,"
"The President's Protest," and others that might be mentioned, we shall
find that they partake of the character of organic formations, or at
least of skilful engineering or architectural constructions. Even Mr.
Calhoun never approached him in this art of giving objective reality to
a speech, which, after all, is found, on analysis, to consist only of a
happy collocation and combination of words, but in Webster the words are
either all alive with the creative spirit of the poet, or, at the worst,
resemble the blocks of granite or marble which the artisan piles, one on
the other, and the result of which, though it may represent a poor style
of architecture, is still a rude specimen of a Gothic edifice. The
artist and artificer are both observable in Webster's work; but the
reality and solidity of the construction cannot be questioned. At the
present time, an educated reader would be specially interested in the
mental processes by which Webster thus succeeded in giving objective
existence and validity to the operations of his mind, and, whether
sympathizing with his opinions or not, would as little think of refusing
to read them because of their Whiggism, as he would think of refusing to
read Homer because of his heathenism, or Dante because of his
Catholicism, or Milton because of his compound of Arianism and
Calvinism, or Goethe because of his Pantheism. The fact which would most
interest such a reader would be, that Webster had, in some mysterious
way, translated and transformed his abstract propositions into concrete
substance and form. The form might offend his reason, his taste, or his
conscience; but he could not avoid admitting that it _had_ a form, while
most speeches, even those made by able men, are comparatively formless,
however lucid they may be in the array of facts, and plausible in the
order and connection of arguments.
In trying to explain this power, the most obvious comparison which would
arise in the mind of an intelligent reader would be, that Webster, as a
rhetorician, resembled Vauban and Cohorn as military engineers. In the
war of debate, he so _fortified_ the propositions he maintained, that
they could not be carried by direct assault, but must be patiently
besieged. The words he employed were simple enough, and fell short of
including the vocabulary of even fifth-rate declaimers; but he had the
art of so disposing them that, to an honest reasoner, the position he
took appeared to be impregnable. To assail it by the ordinary method of
passionate protest and illogical reasoning, was as futile as a dash of
light cavalry would have been against the defences of such cities as
Namur and Lille. Indeed, in his speech, "The Constitution not a Compact
between Sovereign States," he erected a whole Torres Vedras line of
fortifications, on which legislative Massenas dashed themselves in vain,
and, however strong in numbers in respect to the power of voting him
down, recoiled defeated in every attempt to reason him down.
In further illustration of this peculiar power of Webster, the Speech of
the 7th of March, 1850, may be cited, for its delivery is to be ranked
with the most important historical events. For some years it was the
object of the extremes of panegyric and the extremes of execration. But
this effort is really the most loosely constructed of all the great
productions of Webster's mind. In force, compactness, and completeness,
in closeness of thought to things, in closeness of imagery to the
reasoning it illustrates, and in general intellectual fibre, muscle, and
bone, it cannot be compared to such an oration as that on the "First
Settlement of New England," or such a speech as that which had for its
theme, "The Constitution not a Compact between Sovereign States"; but,
after all deductions have been made, it was still a speech which frowned
upon its opponents as a kind of verbal fortress constructed both for the
purpose of defence and aggression. Its fame is due, in a great degree,
to its resistance to a storm of assaults, such as had rarely before been
concentrated on any speech delivered in either branch of the Congress of
the United States. Indeed, a very large portion of the intellect, the
moral sentiment, and the moral passion of the free States was directed
against it. There was not a weapon in the armory of the dialectician or
the rhetorician which was not employed with the intent of demolishing
it. Contempt of Webster was vehemently taught as the beginning of
political wisdom. That a speech, thus assailed, should survive the
attacks made upon it, appeared to be impossible. And yet it did survive,
and is alive now, while better speeches, or what the present writer
thought, at the time, to be more convincing speeches, have not retained
individual existence, however deeply they may have influenced that
public opinion which, in the end, determines political events. "I still
live," was Webster's declaration on his death-bed, when the friends
gathered around it imagined he had breathed his last; and the same words
might be uttered by the Speech of the 7th of March, could it possess the
vocal organ which announces personal existence. Between the time it was
originally delivered and the present year there runs a great and broad
stream of blood, shed from the veins of Northern and Southern men alike;
the whole political and moral constitution of the country has
practically suffered an abrupt change; new problems engage the attention
of thoughtful statesmen; much is forgotten which was once considered of
the first importance; but the 7th of March Speech, battered as it is by
innumerable attacks, is still remembered at least as one which called
forth more power than it embodied in itself. This persistence of life is
due to the fact that it was "organized."
Is this power of organization common among orators? It seems to me
that, on the contrary, it is very rare. In some of Burke's speeches, in
which his sensibility and imagination were thoroughly under the control
of his judgment, as, for instance, his speech on Conciliation with
America, that on Economical Reform, and that to the Electors of Bristol,
we find the orator to be a consummate master of the art of so
constructing a speech that it serves the immediate object which prompted
its delivery, while at the same time it has in it a principle of
vitality which makes it survive the occasion that called it forth. But
the greatest of Burke's speeches, if we look merely at the richness and
variety of mental power and the force and depth of moral passion
displayed in it, is his speech on the Nabob of Arcot's Debts. No speech
ever delivered before any assembly, legislative, judicial, or popular,
can rank with this in respect to the abundance of its facts, reasonings,
and imagery, and the ferocity of its moral wrath. It resembles the El
Dorado that Voltaire's Candide visited, where the boys played with
precious stones of inestimable value, as our boys play with ordinary
marbles; for to the inhabitants of El Dorado diamonds and pearls were as
common as pebbles are with us.
But the defect of this speech, which must still be considered, on the
whole, the most inspired product of Burke's great nature, was this,--
that it did not strike its hearers or readers as having _reality_ for
its basis or the superstructure raised upon it. Englishmen could not
believe then, and most of them probably do not believe now, that it had
any solid foundation in incontrovertible facts. It did not "fit in" to
their ordinary modes of thought; and it has never been ranked with
Burke's "organized" orations; it has never come home to what Bacon
called the "business and bosoms" of his countrymen. They have generally
dismissed it from their imaginations as "a phantasmagoria and a hideous
dream" created by Burke under the impulse of the intense hatred he felt
for the administration which succeeded the overthrow of the government,
which was founded on the coalition of Fox and North.
Now, in simple truth, the speech is the most masterly statement of
facts, relating to the oppression of millions of the people of India,
which was ever forced on the attention of the House of Commons,--a
legislative assembly which, it may be incidentally remarked, was
practically responsible for the just government of the immense Indian
empire of Great Britain. It is curious that the main facts on which the
argument of Burke rests have been confirmed by James Mill, the
coldest-blooded historian that ever narrated the enormous crimes which
attended the rise and progress of the British power in Hindostan, and a
man who also had a strong intellectual antipathy to the mind of Burke.
In making the speech, Burke had documentary evidence of a large portion
of the transactions he denounced, and had _divined_ the rest. Mill
supports him both as regards the facts of which Burke had positive
knowledge, and the facts which he deductively inferred from the facts he
knew. Having thus a strong foundation for his argument, he exerted every
faculty of his mind, and every impulse of his moral sentiment and moral
passion, to overwhelm the leading members of the administration of Pitt,
by attempting to make them accomplices in crimes which would disgrace
even slave-traders on the Guinea coast. The merely intellectual force of
his reasoning is crushing; his analysis seems to be sharpened by his
hatred; and there is no device of contempt, scorn, derision, and direct
personal attack, which he does not unsparingly use. In the midst of all
this mental tumult, inestimable maxims of moral and political wisdom are
shot forth in short sentences, which have so much of the sting and
brilliancy of epigram, that at first we do not appreciate their depth of
thought; and through all there burns such a pitiless fierceness of moral
reprobation of cruelty, injustice, and wrong, that all the accredited
courtesies of debate are violated, once, at least, in every five
minutes. In any American legislative assembly he would have been called
to order at least once in five minutes. The images which the orator
brings in to give vividness to his argument are sometimes coarse; but,
coarse as they are, they admirably reflect the moral turpitude of the
men against whom he inveighs. Among these is the image with which he
covers Dundas, the special friend of Pitt, with a ridicule which
promises to be immortal. Dundas, on the occasion when Fox and Burke
called for papers by the aid of which they proposed to demonstrate the
iniquity of the scheme by which the ministry proposed to settle the
debts of the Nabob of Arcot, pretended that the production of such
papers would be indelicate,--"that this inquiry is of a delicate nature,
and that the state will suffer detriment by the exposure of this
transaction." As Dundas had previously brought out six volumes of
Reports, generally confirming Burke's own views of the corruption and
oppression which marked the administration of affairs in India, he laid
himself open to Burke's celebrated assault. Dundas and delicacy, he
said, were "a rare and singular coalition." And then follows an image of
colossal coarseness, such as might be supposed capable of rousing
thunder-peals of laughter from a company of festive giants,--an image
which Lord Brougham declared offended _his_ sensitive taste,--the
sensitive taste of one of the most formidable legal and legislative
bullies that ever appeared before the juries or Parliament of Great
Britain, and who never hesitated to use any illustration, however
vulgar, which he thought would be effective to degrade his opponents.
But whatever may be thought of the indelicacy of Burke's image, it was
one eminently adapted to penetrate through the thick hide of the
minister of state at whom it was aimed, and it shamed him as far as a
profligate politician like Dundas was capable of feeling the sensation
of shame. But there are also flashes, or rather flames, of impassioned
imagination, in the same speech, which rush up from the main body of its
statements and arguments, and remind us of nothing so much as of those
jets of incandescent gas which, we are told by astronomers, occasionally
leap, from the extreme outer covering of the sun, to the height of a
hundred or a hundred and sixty thousand miles, and testify to the
terrible forces raging within it. After reading this speech for the
fiftieth time, the critic cannot free himself from the rapture of
admiration and amazement which he experienced in his first fresh
acquaintance with it. Yet its delivery in the House of Commons (February
28, 1785) produced an effect so slight, that Pitt, after a few minutes'
consultation with Grenville, concluded that it was not worth the trouble
of being answered; and the House of Commons, obedient to the Prime
Minister's direction, negatived, by a large majority, the motion in
advocating which Burke poured out the wonderful treasures of his
intellect and imagination. To be sure, the House was tired to death with
the discussion, was probably very sleepy, and the orator spoke five
hours after the members had already shouted, "Question! Question!"
The truth is, that this speech, unmatched though it is in the literature
of eloquence, had not, as has been previously stated, the air of
reality. It struck the House as a magnificent Oriental dream, as an
Arabian Nights' Entertainment, as a tale told by an inspired madman,
"full of sound and fury, signifying nothing"; and the evident partisan
intention of the orator to blast Pitt's administration by exhibiting its
complicity in one of the most enormous frauds recorded in history,
confirmed the dandies, the cockneys, the bankers, and the country
gentlemen, who, as members of the House of Commons, stood by Pitt with
all the combined force of their levity, their venality, and their
stupidity, in the propriety of voting Burke down. And even now, when the
substantial truth of all the facts he alleged is established on evidence
which convinces historians, the admiring reader can understand why it
failed to convince Burke's contemporaries, and why it still appears to
lack the characteristics of a speech thoroughly organized. Indeed, the
mind of Burke, when it was delivered, can only be compared to a volcanic
mountain in eruption;--not merely a volcano like that of Vesuvius,
visited by scientists and amateurs in crowds, when it deigns to pour
forth its flames and lava for the entertainment of the multitude; but a
lonely volcano, like that of Etna, rising far above Vesuvius in height,
far removed from all the vulgar curiosity of a body of tourists, but
rending the earth on which it stands with the mighty earthquake throes
of its fiery centre and heart. The moral passion,--perhaps it would be
more just to say the moral fury,--displayed in the speech, is elemental,
and can be compared to nothing less intense than the earth's interior
fire and heat.
Now in Webster's great legislative efforts, his mind is never exhibited
in a state of eruption. In the most excited debates in which he bore a
prominent part, nothing strikes us more than the admirable
self-possession, than the majestic inward calm, which presides over all
the operations of his mind and the impulses of his sensibility, so that,
in building up the fabric of his speech, he has his reason, imagination,
and passion under full control,--using each faculty and feeling as the
occasion may demand, but never allowing himself to be used _by_ it,--and
always therefore conveying the impression of power in reserve, while he
may, in fact, be exercising all the power he has to the utmost. In
laboriously erecting his edifice of reasoning he also studiously regards
the intellects and the passions of ordinary men; strives to bring his
mind into cordial relations with theirs; employs every faculty he
possesses to give reality, to give even visibility, to his thoughts; and
though he never made a speech which rivals that of Burke on the Nabob of
Arcot's Debts, in respect to grasp of understanding, astounding wealth
of imagination and depth of moral passion, he always so contrived to
organize his materials into a complete whole, that the result stood out
clearly to the sight of the mind, as a structure resting on strong
foundations, and reared to due height by the mingled skill of the
artisan and the artist. When he does little more than weld his materials
together, he is still an artificer of the old school of giant workmen,
the school that dates its pedigree from Tubal Cain.
After all this wearisome detail and dilution of the idea attempted to be
expressed, it may be that I have failed to convey an adequate impression
of what constitutes Webster's distinction among orators, as far as
orators have left speeches which are considered an invaluable addition
to the literature of the language in which they were originally
delivered. Everybody understands why any one of the great sermons of
Jeremy Taylor, or the sermon of Dr. South on "Man created in the Image
of God," or the sermon of Dr. Barrow on "Heavenly Rest," differs from
the millions on millions of doubtless edifying sermons that have been
preached and printed during the last two centuries and a half; but
everybody does not understand the distinction between one brilliant
oration and another, when both made a great sensation at the time, while
only one survived in literature. Probably Charles James Fox was a more
effective speaker in the House of Commons than Edmund Burke, probably
Henry Clay was a more effective speaker in Congress than Daniel Webster;
but when the occasions on which their speeches were made are found
gradually to fade from the memory of men, why is it that the speeches of
Fox and Clay have no recognized position in literature, while those of
Burke and Webster are ranked with literary productions of the first
class? The reason is as really obvious as that which explains the
exceptional value of some of the efforts of the great orators of the
pulpit. Jeremy Taylor, Dr. South, and Dr. Barrow, different as they were
in temper and disposition, succeeded in "organizing" some masterpieces
in their special department of intellectual and moral activity; and the
same is true of Burke and Webster in the departments of legislation and
political science. The "occasion" was merely an opportunity for the
consolidation into a speech of the rare powers and attainments, the
large personality and affluent thought, which were the spiritual
possessions of the man who made it,--a speech which represented the
whole intellectual manhood of the speaker,--a manhood in which
knowledge, reason, imagination, and sensibility were all consolidated
under the directing power of will.
A pertinent example of the difference we have attempted to indicate may
be easily found in contrasting Fox's closing speech on the East India
Bill with Burke's on the same subject. For immediate effect on the House
of Commons, it ranks with the most masterly of Fox's Parliamentary
efforts. The hits on his opponents were all "telling." The _argumentum
ad hominem_, embodied in short, sharp statements, or startling
interrogatories, was never employed with more brilliant success. The
reasoning was rapid, compact, encumbered by no long enumeration of
facts, and, though somewhat unscrupulous here and there, was driven home
upon his adversaries with a skill that equalled its audacity. It may be
said that there is not a sentence in the whole speech which was not
calculated to sting a sleepy audience into attention, or to give
delight to a fatigued audience which still managed to keep its eyes and
minds wide open. Even in respect to the principles of liberty and
justice, which were the animating life of the bill, Fox's terse
sentences contrast strangely with the somewhat more lumbering and
elaborate paragraphs of Burke. "What," he exclaims, putting his argument
in his favorite interrogative form,--"what is the most odious species of
tyranny? Precisely that which this bill is meant to annihilate. That a
handful of men, free themselves, should exercise the most base and
abominable despotism over millions of their fellow-creatures; that
innocence should be the victim of oppression; that industry should toil
for rapine; that the harmless laborer should sweat, not for his own
benefit, but for the luxury and rapacity of tyrannic depredation;--in a
word, that thirty millions of men, gifted by Providence with the
ordinary endowments of humanity, should groan under a system of
despotism unmatched in all the histories of the world? What is the end
of all government? Certainly, the happiness of the governed. Others may
hold different opinions; but this is mine, and I proclaim it. What,
then, are we to think of a government whose good fortune is supposed to
spring from the calamities of its subjects, whose aggrandizement grows
out of the miseries of mankind? This is the kind of government exercised
under the East Indian Company upon the natives of Hindostan; and the
subversion of that infamous government is the main object of the bill in
question." And afterwards he says, with admirable point and pungency of
statement: "Every line in both the bills which I have had the honor to
introduce, presumes the possibility of bad administration; for every
word breathes suspicion. This bill supposes that men are but men. It
confides in no integrity; it trusts no character; it inculcates the
wisdom of a jealousy of power, and annexes responsibility, not only to
every _action_, but even to the _inaction_ of those who are to dispense
it. The necessity of these provisions must be evident, when it is known
that the different misfortunes of the company have resulted not more
from what their servants _did_, than from what the _masters did not_."
There is a directness in such sentences as these which we do not find in
Burke's speech on the East India Bill; but Burke's remains as a part of
English literature, and in form and substance, especially in substance,
is so immensely superior to that of Fox, that, in quoting sentences from
the latter, one may almost be supposed to rescue them from that neglect
which attends all speeches which do not reach beyond the occasion which
calls them forth. In Bacon's phrase, the speech of Fox shows "small
matter, and infinite agitation of wit"; in Burke's, we discern large
matter with an abundance of "wit" proper to the discussion of the
matter, but nothing which suggests the idea of mere "agitation." Fox, in
his speeches, subordinated every thing to the immediate impression he
might make on the House of Commons. He deliberately gave it as his
opinion, that a speech that read well must be a bad speech; and, in a
literary sense, the House of Commons, which he entered before he was
twenty, may be called both the cradle and the grave of his fame. It has
been said that he was a debater whose speeches should be studied by
every man who wishes "to learn the science of logical defence"; that he
alone, among English orators, resembles Demosthenes, inasmuch as his
reasoning is "penetrated and made red-hot by passion"; and that nothing
could excel the effect of his delivery when "he was in the full paroxysm
of inspiration, foaming, screaming, choked by the rushing multitude of
his words." But not one of his speeches, not even that on the East India
Bill, or on the Westminster Scrutiny, or on the Russian Armament, or on
Parliamentary Reform, or on Mr. Pitt's Rejection of Bonaparte's
Overtures for Peace, has obtained an abiding place in the literature of
Great Britain. It would be no disparagement to an educated man, if it
were said that he had never read these speeches; but it would be a
serious bar to his claim to be considered an English scholar, if he
confessed to be ignorant of the great speeches of Burke; for such a
confession would be like admitting that he had never read the first book
of Hooker's Ecclesiastical Polity, Bacon's Essays and Advancement of
Learning, Milton's Areopagitica, Butler's Analogy, and Adam Smith's
Wealth of Nations.
When we reflect on the enormous number of American speeches which, when
they were first delivered, were confidently predicted, by appreciating
friends, to insure to the orators a fame which would be immortal, one
wonders a little at the quiet persistence of the speeches of Webster in
refusing to die with the abrupt suddenness of other orations, which, at
the time of their delivery, seemed to have an equal chance of renown.
The lifeless remains of such unfortunate failures are now entombed in
that dreariest of all mausoleums, the dingy quarto volumes, hateful to
all human eyes, which are lettered on the back with the title of
"Congressional Debates,"--a collection of printed matter which members
of Congress are wont to send to a favored few among their constituents,
and which are immediately consigned to the dust-barrel or sold to
pedlers in waste paper, according as the rage of the recipients takes a
scornful or an economical direction. It would seem that the speeches of
Webster are saved from this fate, by the fact that, in them, the mental
and moral life of a great man, and of a great master of the English
language, are organized in a palpable intellectual form. The reader
feels that they have some of the substantial qualities which he
recognizes in looking at the gigantic constructions of the master
workmen among the crowd of the world's engineers and architects, in
looking at the organic products of Nature herself, and in surveying,
through the eye of his imagination, those novel reproductions of Nature
which great poets have embodied in works which are indelibly stamped
with the character of deathlessness.
But Webster is even more obviously a poet--subordinating "the shows of
things to the desires of the mind"--in his magnificent idealization, or
idolization, of the Constitution and the Union. By the magic of his
imagination and sensibility he contrived to impress on the minds of a
majority of the people of the free States a vague, grand idea that the
Constitution was a sacred instrument of government,--a holy shrine of
fundamental law, which no unhallowed hands could touch without
profanation,--a digested system of rights and duties, resembling those
institutes which were, in early times, devised by the immortal gods for
the guidance of infirm mortal man; and the mysterious creatures, half
divine and half human, who framed this remarkable document, were always
reverently referred to as "the Fathers,"--as persons who excelled all
succeeding generations in sagacity and wisdom; as inspired prophets, who
were specially selected by Divine Providence to frame the political
scriptures on which our political faith was to be based, and by which
our political reason was to be limited. The splendor of the glamour thus
cast over the imaginations and sentiments of the people was all the more
effective because it was an effluence from the mind of a statesman who,
of all other statesmen of the country, was deemed the most practical,
and the least deluded by any misguiding lights of fancy and abstract
speculation.
There can be little doubt that Webster's impressive idealization of the
Constitution gave a certain narrowness to American thinking on
constitutional government and the science of politics and legislation.
Foreigners, of the most liberal views, could not sometimes restrain an
expression of wonder, when they found that our most intelligent men,
even our jurists and publicists, hardly condescended to notice the
eminent European thinkers on the philosophy of government, so absorbed
were they in the contemplation of the perfection of their own. When the
great civil war broke out, hundreds of thousands of American citizens
marched to the battle-field with the grand passages of Webster glowing
in their hearts. They met death cheerfully in the cause of the
"Constitution and Union," as by him expounded and idealized; and if they
were so unfortunate as not to be killed, but to be taken captive, they
still rotted to death in Southern prisons, sustained by sentences of
Webster's speeches which they had declaimed as boys in their country
schools. Of all the triumphs of Webster as a leader of public opinion,
the most remarkable was his infusing into the minds of the people of the
free States the belief that the Constitution as it existed in his time
was an organic fact, springing from the intelligence, hearts, and wills
of the people of the United States, and not, as it really was, an
ingenious mechanical contrivance of wise men, to which the people, at
the time, gave their assent.
The constitutions of the separate States of the Union were doubtless
rooted in the habits, sentiments, and ideas of their inhabitants. But
the Constitution of the United States could not possess this advantage,
however felicitously it may have been framed for the purpose of keeping,
for a considerable period, peace between the different sections of the
country. As long, therefore, as the institution of negro slavery lasted,
it could not be called a Constitution of States organically "United";
for it lacked the principle of _growth_, which characterizes all
constitutions of government which are really adapted to the progressive
needs of a people, if the people have in them any impulse which
stimulates them to advance. The unwritten constitution of Great Britain
has this advantage, that a decree of Parliament can alter the whole
representative system, annihilating by a vote of the two houses all laws
which the Parliament had enacted in former years. In Great Britain,
therefore, a measure which any Imperial Parliament passes becomes at
once the supreme law of the land, though it may nullify a great number
of laws which previous Parliaments had passed under different conditions
of the sentiment of the nation. Our Constitution, on the other hand,
provides for the contingencies of growth in the public sentiment only by
amendments to the Constitution. These amendments require more than a
majority of all the political forces represented in Congress; and Mr.
Calhoun, foreseeing that a collision must eventually occur between the
two sections, carried with him, not only the South, but a considerable
minority of the North, in resisting any attempt to limit the _extension_
of slavery. On this point the passions and principles of the people of
the slave-holding and the majority of the people of the
non-slave-holding States came into violent opposition; and there was no
possibility that any amendment to the Constitution could be ratified,
which would represent either the growth of the Southern people in their
ever-increasing belief that negro slavery was not only a good in itself,
but a good which ought to be extended, or the growth of the Northern
people in their ever-increasing hostility both to slavery and its
extension. Thus two principles, each organic in its nature, and
demanding indefinite development, came into deadly conflict under the
mechanical forms of a Constitution which was not organic.
A considerable portion of the speeches in this volume is devoted to
denunciations of violations of the Constitution perpetrated by Webster's
political opponents. These violations, again, would seem to prove that
written constitutions follow practically the same law of development
which marks the progress of the unwritten. By a strained system of
Congressional interpretation, the Constitution has been repeatedly
compelled to yield to the necessities of the party dominant, for the
time, in the government; and has, if we may believe Webster, been
repeatedly changed without being constitutionally "amended." The causes
which led to the most terrible civil war recorded in history were
silently working beneath the forms of the Constitution,--both parties,
by the way, appealing to its provisions,--while Webster was idealizing
it as the utmost which humanity could come to in the way of civil
government. In 1848, when nearly all Europe was in insurrection against
its rulers, he proudly said that our Constitution promised to be the
_oldest_, as well as the best, in civilized states. Meanwhile the
institution of negro slavery was undermining the whole fabric of the
Union. The moral division between the South and North was widening into
a division between the religion of the two sections. The Southern
statesmen, economists, jurists, publicists, and ethical writers had
adapted their opinions to the demands which the defenders of the
institution of slavery imposed on the action of the human intellect and
conscience; but it was rather startling to discover that the Christian
religion, as taught in the Southern States, was a religion which had no
vital connection with the Christianity taught in the Northern States.
There is nothing more astounding, to a patient explorer of the causes
which led to the final explosion, than this opposition of religions. The
mere form of the dogmas common to the religion of both sections might be
verbally identical; but a volume of sermons by a Southern doctor of
divinity, as far as he touched on the matter of slavery, was as
different from one published by his Northern brother, in the essential
moral and humane elements of Christianity, as though they were divided
from each other by a gulf as wide as that which yawns between a Druid
priest and a Christian clergyman.
The politicians of the South, whether they were the mouthpieces of the
ideas and passions of their constituents, or were, as Webster probably
thought, more or less responsible for their foolishness and bitterness,
were ever eager to precipitate a conflict, which Webster was as eager to
prevent, or at least to postpone. It was fortunate for the North, that
the inevitable conflict did not come in 1850, when the free States were
unprepared for it. Ten years of discussion and preparation were allowed;
when the war broke out, it found the North in a position to meet and
eventually to overcome the enemies of the Union; and the Constitution,
not as it _was_, but as it _is_, now represents a form of government
which promises to be permanent; for after passing through its baptism of
fire and blood, the Constitution contains nothing which is not in
harmony with any State government founded on the principle of equal
rights which it guarantees, and is proof against all attacks but those
which may proceed from the extremes of human folly and wickedness. But
that, before the civil war, it was preserved so long under conditions
which constantly threatened it with destruction, is due in a
considerable degree to the circumstance that it found in Daniel Webster
its poet as well as its "expounder."
In conclusion it may be said that the style of Webster is pre-eminently
distinguished by manliness. Nothing little, weak, whining, or
sentimental can be detected in any page of the six volumes of his works.
A certain strength and grandeur of personality is prominent in all his
speeches. When he says "I," or "my," he never appears to indulge in the
bravado of self-assertion, because the words are felt to express a
positive, stalwart, almost colossal manhood, which had already been
implied in the close-knit sentences in which he embodied his statements
and arguments. He is an eminent instance of the power which character
communicates to style. Though evidently proud, self-respecting, and
high-spirited, he is ever above mere vanity and egotism. Whenever he
gives emphasis to the personal pronoun the reader feels that he had as
much earned the right to make his opinion an authority, as he had earned
the right to use the words he employs to express his ideas and
sentiments. Thus, in the celebrated _Smith Will_ trial, his antagonist,
Mr. Choate, quoted a decision of Lord Chancellor Camden. In his reply,
Webster argued against its validity as though it were merely a
proposition laid down by Mr. Choate. "But it is not mine, it is Lord
Camden's" was the instant retort. Webster paused for half a minute, and
then, with his eye fixed on the presiding judge, he replied: "Lord
Camden was a great judge; he is respected by every American, for he was
on our side in the Revolution; but, may it please your honor, _I_ differ
from my Lord Camden." There was hardly a lawyer in the United States who
could have made such a statement without exposing himself to ridicule;
but it did not seem at all ridiculous, when the "I" stood for Daniel
Webster. In his early career as a lawyer, his mode of reasoning was such
as to make him practically a thirteenth juror in the panel; when his
fame was fully established, he contrived, in some mysterious way, to
seat himself by the side of the judges on the bench, and appear to be
consulting with them as a jurist, rather than addressing them as an
advocate. The personality of the man was always suppressed until there
seemed to be need of asserting it; and then it was proudly pushed into
prominence, though rarely passing beyond the limits which his
acknowledged eminence as a statesman and lawyer did not justify him in
asserting it. Among the selections in the present volume where his
individuality becomes somewhat aggressive, and breaks loose from the
restraints ordinarily self-imposed on it, may be mentioned his speech on
his Reception at Boston (1842), his Marshfield Speech (1848), and his
speech at his Reception at Buffalo (1851). Whatever may be thought of
the course of argument pursued in these, they are at least thoroughly
penetrated with a manly spirit,--a manliness somewhat haughty and
defiant, but still consciously strong in its power to return blow for
blow, from whatever quarter the assault may come.
But the real intellectual and moral manliness of Webster underlies all
his great orations and speeches, even those where the animating life
which gives them the power to persuade, convince, and uplift the
reader's mind, seems to be altogether impersonal; and this plain force
of manhood, this sturdy grapple with every question that comes before
his understanding for settlement, leads him contemptuously to reject all
the meretricious aids and ornaments of mere rhetoric, and is prominent,
among the many exceptional qualities of his large nature, which have
given him a high position among the prose-writers of his country as a
consummate master of English style.