Quite at the end of Lowell’s stated contributions to the _Standard_ came the longest of his articles in the form of a running comment on Webster’s fateful seventh of March speech, and in his comment he pronounced that judgment which was inevitable from an anti-slavery prophet. “It has been characterized,” he says, “like most of Mr. Webster’s speeches, as a ‘masterly effort.’ Some of them have been masterly successes, but this we sincerely hope and believe _was_ an effort.... It is the plea of a lawyer and an advocate, but not of a statesman. It is not even the plea of an advocate on the side which he was retained to argue. We have heard enough of Democratic defalcations: here is a great Whig defalcation which dwarfs them all, for it is not money which has disappeared in this instance, but professions, pledges, principles. Men do not defend themselves in advance against accusations of inconsistency unless they feel an uncomfortable sense that there is some justice in the charge. This feeling pervades a great part of Mr. Webster’s speech like a blush.” He uses a fine scorn in dissecting Mr. Webster’s specious plea that slavery is nowhere directly prohibited in the teachings of the New Testament, and quietly asks if incest is anywhere forbidden there. “But if,” he adds, Mr. Webster were really in search of a scriptural prohibition of slavery, we think he might find it in that commandment which forbids us to covet anything that is our neighbor’s. For if we may not do that, then _a fortiori_ we may not covet our neighbor himself.... Mr. Webster, we have said, avoids carefully all the moral points of the argument. He falls in with the common assumption that this is a question of political preponderance between the North and the South.... It is not a question between the North and the South. It is a struggle between the South (we had almost said Calhoun) and the spirit of the nineteenth century after Christ.... Is slavery the only thing whose sensitiveness is to be respected? Freedom has been thought by some to have her finer feelings also.” And he closes the discussion of the speech in these words:-- “If Mr. Webster’s speech should not find any one to confute it in the Senate,--a hard task, for assumptions and tergiversations are not easily replied to,--it will not be without answers abundant and conclusive. It will be answered by every generous instinct of the human heart, by every principle which a New Englander has imbibed in the Church, the Schoolhouse, or the Home, but especially by those inextinguishable sentiments which move men’s hatred of treachery and contempt for the traitor.”