The Plymouth oration, delivered in 1820, begins a new and very important stage of Webster's career. As Virginia was the mother of the southern States, so New England was in large measure the mother of the northern. The latter was the very fountain of the free-labor nationalization. And as she was known to be exceptionally advanced in intellectual as well as material development, she was to all the free States both their great example and highest authority. Hardly anybody has even yet fully taken in all the permanent good which New England has done for herself at home and for her children and scholars outside. Of course still less of it was understood in 1820. But in the Plymouth oration Webster set forth so much of it, the effect upon New England was magical. It was as if he had raised a curtain concealing great riches and treasures of her merit and glory, the existence of which had not been suspected. New Englanders all fell in love with him, and accorded him the foremost place among their counsellors. The anti-slavery spirit of the speech deserves special notice. I do not mean to emphasize the oft-quoted passage denouncing the African slave-trade; for everybody in the south--even the smuggler and the few purchasers who encouraged him--had been against legalizing it, for reasons mentioned above, from a time long before the southern States showed a desire in the constitutional convention to stop the trade at once. I mean his mention of slavery in the West Indies. I do not think that he had the south in mind, stressing as he does the absenteeism of the masters and the mortgages of their lands for capital borrowed in England. But much else that he says of the evil effects of slavery could be easily applied, at least in some measure, to the system as it then existed in the south, such as, for instance, the backwardness to make permanent improvements or endow colleges. His contrast of New England with the West Indies is intended to show that a free-labor community is far superior to a slave-labor community in the most important elements of a good and progressive civilization. His conviction of this truth is serious and undoubting. And those few words, "the unmitigated toil of slavery," which show that he erroneously believed that the slave toiled as hard as the wage-earning laborer, evince a strong moral revulsion on his part. We summarize as to the Plymouth oration. It made Webster really the political leader of New England, which--the animosity excited by the embargo and the late war having become a forgotten thing of the past--is now both in command of and also in the van of the free-labor and anti-slavery nationalization, destined by the powers to perpetuate the union.