DANIEL WEBSTER.

After a Daguerreotype by Whipple, Engraved by Ritchie.

FBSTER

was called "Black Dan" because of the swarthiness of complexion which is suggested by the Whipple portrait. It is said that when be replied to Hayre, the entire North joined in rejoicing at

the discovery of a champion in "Black Dan Webster.»

higher law" made it a duty to violate it. He thought that the spirit of concession and compromise which made possible the formation of the "more perfect union" of 1789 ought to prevail in all the relations of the States and the peoples of the States to each other. He hated slavery not less than did Washington and Jefferson, but he would have trusted wholly to evolution, to education, and to moral force to eradicate it. If "union with slaveholders" had in it such an element of shame as it seemed to Garrison, Phillips, and Parker to have, to him, nevertheless, that union seemed to command the awful respect due to a parent, and its shame itself to compel - not exposure, but the awe which inspired the Sons of Noah to walk backward with averted face to cast their mantle over their parent's nakedness. It was not because of his weakness, but of his most admirable trait that Webster died heartbroken and deserted by his generation. To the last he had the same abundant charity for the utmost weaknesses of the people of South Carolina and Louisiana that Washington had for those of Massachusetts and New Hampshire. Like Clay, who had much of this great strength of affection for all his countrymen, he had weaknesses which made him ineffective at the great crisis of his career, but these weaknesses are in no sense responsible for his view of the Constitution as a series of compromises on which "the more perfect union" depended. Against nullifiers, abolitionists, and secessionists, he opposed a sense of rectitude which had its origin in a deepseated consciousness of human fallibility. He felt his own weakness too much, he was too well aware of the weaknesses of others to be willing to drive any one to the wall, no matter how great his advantage of superior knowledge or superior virtue. To him "liberty and union, now and forever, one and inseparable," meant a permanent policy of continual patience under the wrongs which men inflict on each other through "unenlightened selfishness." That it was possible through the use of force to compel his opponents to become "everlastingly right" would have seemed to him absurd, and had he lived with the power to do so, he would have gone on fighting first and compromising afterwards-compromising more readily when he had the advantage than when he had lost it-and this to the end of the chapter. He was a "compromiser" because he was one of the greatest constitutional lawyers, one of the most benevolent men, one of the most patriotic Americans of his generation.

Though he had none of the organizing power of a great political leader, the testimony of his contemporaries shows that his power over those who heard him and sympathized with his thought sufficiently to cease conscious resistance to it, was too great to be adequately described. "Three or four times," writes Professor Ticknor, after listening to one of his speeches, "I thought my temples would