and the same; and that to admit the first, promising to stop short at
the second, was as though a man "should take the plunge of Niagara and
cry out that he would stop half-way down." Mr. Webster's principal
speech on this subject, delivered in 1832, has, and will ever have,
with the people and the Courts of the United States, the authority of
a judicial decision; and it might very properly be added to popular
editions of the Constitution as an appendix. Into the creation of the
feeling and opinion which fought out the late war for the Union a
thousand and ten thousand causes entered; every man who had ever
performed a patriotic action, and every man who ever from his heart
had spoken a patriotic word, contributed to its production; but to no
man, perhaps, were we more indebted for it than to the Daniel Webster
of 1830 and 1832.
We cannot so highly commend his votes in 1832 as his speeches. General
Jackson's mode of dealing with nullification seems to us the model for
every government to follow which has to deal with discontented
subjects:--1. To take care that the laws are obeyed; 2. To remove the
real grounds of discontent. This was General Jackson's plan. This,
also, was the aim of Mr. Clay's compromise. Mr. Webster objected to
both, on the ground that nullification was rebellion, and that no
legislation respecting the pretext for rebellion should be entertained
until the rebellion was quelled. Thus he came out of the battle, dear
to the thinking people of the country, but estranged from the three
political powers,--Henry Clay and his friends, General Jackson and his
friends, Calhoun and his friends; and though he soon lapsed again
under the leadership of Mr. Clay, there was never again a cordial
union between him and any interior circle of politicians who could
have gratified his ambition. Deceived by the thunders of applause
which greeted him wherever he went, and the intense adulation of his
own immediate circle, he thought that he too could be an independent
power in politics. Two wild vagaries seemed to have haunted him ever
after: first, that a man could merit the Presidency; secondly, that a
man could get the Presidency by meriting it.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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