Col. Hayne and his friends, as they listened to these words, breathing a calm consciousness of power not unmixed with a grand disdain, must have realized that they had exulted too soon. Indeed Hayne’s friends had not all looked forward with confidence to his victory. Senator Iredell, of North Carolina, to a friend of Hayne’s who was praising his speech, had said the evening previous, “He has started the lion—but wait till we hear his roar, or feel his claws.” While I do not propose to give an abstract of this famous oration, I shall quote some of the most brilliant and effective passages, well known and familiar though they are, because they will be re-read with fresh and added interest in this connection. There was not a son of Massachusetts, nay, there was not a New Englander, whose heart was not thrilled by the splendid tribute to Massachusetts. “Mr. President, I shall enter upon no encomium on Massachusetts; she needs none. There she is. Behold her and judge for yourselves. There is her history; the world knows it by heart. The past, at least, is secure. There is Boston, and Concord, and Lexington, and Bunker Hill; and there they will remain forever. The bones of her sons, falling in the great struggle for independence, now lie mingled with the soil of every State from New England to Georgia, and there they will lie forever. And, sir, where American liberty raised its first voice, and where its youth was nurtured and sustained, there it still lives, in the strength of its manhood and full of its original spirit. If discord and disunion shall wound it, if party strife and blind ambition shall hawk at and tear it, if folly and madness, if uneasiness under salutary and necessary restraint, shall succeed in separating it from that union by which alone its existence is made sure, it will stand, in the end, by the side of that cradle in which its infancy was rocked; it will stretch forth its arm with whatever of vigor it may still retain over the friends who gather round it; and it will fall at last, if fall it must, amidst the proudest monuments of its own glory, and on the very spot of its origin.” Mr. Webster shows his magnanimity by pronouncing, in like manner, an eulogium upon his opponent’s native State, which is in bright contrast with the mean and unjust attacks of Col. Hayne upon Massachusetts. This is what he says: