This great speech marks the highest point attained by Mr. Webster as a public man. He never surpassed it, he never equalled it afterwards. It was his zenith intellectually, politically, and as an orator. His fame grew and extended in the years which followed, he won ample distinction in other fields, he made many other splendid speeches, but he never went beyond the reply which he made to the Senator from South Carolina on January 26, 1830. The doctrine of nullification, which was the main point both with Hayne and Webster, was no new thing. The word was borrowed from the Kentucky resolutions of 1799, and the principle was contained in the more cautious phrases of the contemporary Virginia resolutions and of the Hartford Convention in 1814. The South Carolinian reproduction in 1830 was fuller and more elaborate than its predecessors and supported by more acute reasoning, but the principle was unchanged. Mr. Webster's argument was simple but overwhelming. He admitted fully the right of revolution. He accepted the proposition that no one was bound to obey an unconstitutional law; but the essential question was who was to say whether a law was unconstitutional or not. Each State has that authority, was the reply of the nullifiers, and if the decision is against the validity of the law it cannot be executed within the limits of the dissenting State. The vigorous sarcasm with which Mr. Webster depicted practical nullification, and showed that it was nothing more or less than revolution when actually carried out, was really the conclusive answer to the nullifying doctrine. But Mr. Calhoun and his school eagerly denied that nullification rested on the right to revolt against oppression. They argued that it was a constitutional right; that they could live within the Constitution and beyond it,--inside the house and outside it at one and the same time. They contended that, the Constitution being a compact between the States, the Federal government was the creation of the States; yet, in the same breath, they declared that the general government was a party to the contract from which it had itself emanated, in order to get rid of the difficulty of proving that, while the single dissenting State could decide against the validity of a law, the twenty or more other States, also parties to the contract, had no right to deliver an opposite judgment which should be binding as the opinion of the majority of the court. There was nothing very ingenious or very profound in the argument by which Mr. Webster demonstrated the absurdity of the doctrine which attempted to make nullification a peaceable constitutional privilege, when it could be in practice nothing else than revolution. But the manner in which he put the argument was magnificent and final. As he himself said, in this very speech of Samuel Dexter, "his statement was argument, his inference demonstration."