On the 18th of January, 1882, the hundredth birthday of Daniel Webster, the Marshfield Club assembled at the Parker House, in Boston, to take suitable notice of the anniversary. Though thirty years had elapsed since his death there was one at least present, Hon. Robert C. Winthrop, who had been intimately associated with him in public life, having been his successor in the Senate, and a warm personal friend. Most notable among the addresses was that of Gov. Long, of Massachusetts, which I shall venture to insert here, as containing in brief compass a fitting estimate of the great statesman whom the company had assembled to honor. GOVERNOR LONG’S ADDRESS. “It is but a poor tribute that even the most eloquent voice, least of all mine, can pay for Massachusetts to the memory of her greatest statesman, her mightiest intellect and her most powerful orator. Among her sons he towers like the lonely and massive shaft on Bunker Hill, upon the base and the crest of which his name is emblazoned clearer than if chiseled deep in its granite cubes. For years he was her synonym. Among the States he sustained her at that proud height which Winthrop and Sam Adams gave her in the colonial and provincial days. With what matchless grandeur he defended her! With what overwhelming power he impressed her convictions upon the national life! God seems to appoint men to special work, and, that done, the very effort of its achievement exhausts them, and they rise not again to the summit of their meridian. So it was with Webster. He knows little even of written constitutions and frames of government who does not know that they exist almost less in the letter than in the interpretation and construction of the letter. In this light it is not too much to say that the Constitution of the United States, as it existed when it carried our country through the greatest peril that ever tested it, was the crystallization of the mind of Webster as well as of its original framers. It came from them and was only accepted by some of our own as a compact of States, sovereign in all but certain enumerated powers delegated to a central government. He made it the crucible of a welded Union—the charter of one great country, the United States of America. He made the States a nation and enfolded them in its single banner. It was the overwhelming logic of his discussion, the household familiarity of his simple but irresistible statement, that gave us munition to fight the war for the preservation of the Union and the abolition of slavery. It was his eloquence, clear as crystal and precipitating itself in the school-books and literature of a people, which had trained up the generation of twenty years ago to regard this nation as one, to love its flag with a patriotism that knew no faction or section, to be loyal to the whole country, and to find in its Constitution power to suppress any hand or combination raised against it. The great Rebellion of 1861 went down hardly more before