Few leaders have had more warm admirers than Calhoun. Oliver Dyer in his _Great Senators_, tells us he was tall and gaunt, his complexion dark and Indian-like. Eyes large, black, piercing, scintillant; his iron-gray hair hung down in thick masses. He was remarkable for the exceeding courtesy of his demeanor and for the sweetness and bell-like resonance of his voice. His private life, what could not be said of most of his contemporaries, was unimpeachable. His followers are fond of praising his “inexorable logic.” They probably called it so because he did not hesitate to carry out his reasoning to the extremest extravagance of conclusions. In his speech in 1833, in reply to Webster, he admitted that this sovereignty of each State, there being four and twenty of them, did give each State a separate right to judge of a law of Congress, “four and twenty vetoes.” He instanced with approval the government of Rome, where the plebeians and patricians could check and overrule each other through the tribunes and the Senate. He knew “nowhere, no case in history where the power of arresting of government was too strong, except in Poland, where every freeman possessed a veto.” But even there he speaks of it with favor, as the source of “the highest and most lofty attachment to liberty.” He overlooked that Rome’s plebeian veto produced a Sulla and a Cæsar and ended in an absolute despotism over an abject people, and that the government of Poland, unstable as water, vanished from the face of the earth. He spoke of this country as sunken into avarice, intrigue, and electioneering, from which only an opposition like Carolina’s could arouse it. Afterwards, in 1850, he said: “What was once a constitutional federal republic is now converted, in reality, into one as absolute as that of the autocrat of Russia, and as despotic in its tendency as any absolute government that ever existed.” And yet many people of the South believed or brought themselves to believe this, and most of their writers now arguing for State sovereignty profess the same opinion.