From that hour patriotism rose like a flood. For two generations the reply has been to Americans what Demosthenes on the Crown was to the Athenians. Webster placed the nation above the union, made the Nation, in its constitutionally specified sphere of action, sovereign and primary, the States secondary and subordinate. He thus made possible a world-wide victory for free institutions, by which, to-day, democracy and self-government are making thrones totter and tyrants tremble, and giving us the assurance that no government is so stable as a government conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are free and equal. Webster made logical use of "government of the people, by the people, and for the people." The soldiers of Gettysburg exhibited their willingness to defend such a government, to live for free institutions, and if necessary to die for them. Now that long time has passed, Southerners and Northerners alike concede that Calhoun made three mistakes. He fought against progress and civilization that has destroyed slavery on moral grounds. He also failed to see that slavery was the worst possible system of production, for if the South produced under slavery 4,000,000 bales of cotton in 1861, now that the coloured man is free she produces 15,000,000 bales of cotton per year. His theory of the right of the minority as a sovereign right of secession has broken down at the bar of civilization. If South Carolina or any State has the right to withdraw, whenever the majority of other States outvote it, it means that the minority always has a right to disobey the majority, which means not simply the withdrawal of the one State from the many States, but later, the withdrawal of a few counties from a majority of the counties in that State, giving an endless series of confusions. If any single doctrine is established among civilized nations to-day it is this one, under democratic institutions--the right of the majority to rule. Three years later Webster once more marked out the basis of the North's position for all time in a debate with Calhoun himself. Without the magnificent flights of eloquence which distinguished the Reply to Hayne, this speech of February 16, 1833, was filled with close and powerful reasoning. Once and for all he maintained: "1. That the Constitution of the United States is not a league, confederacy, or compact between the people of the several States, in their sovereign capacities, but a government proper, founded on the adoption of the people, and creating direct relations between itself and individuals. "2. That no State authority has power to dissolve these relations; that nothing can dissolve them but revolution. And that consequently there can be no such thing as secession without revolution."