His detractors charged that the entire speech was a bid for the support of the south in his eager struggle for the presidency. That he passionately longed for the chair was manifest. But his was not the sordid ambition of the professional place-hunter. He had a heaven-reaching aspiration to show America what a president should be in those angry times. He must have been conscious that he was the only man of gifts to do the great deed. What an appropriate climax that would have been for the invincible defender of the union, who, when replying to Hayne twenty years before, had outsoared Pindar in eulogizing South Carolina leading the south, and Massachusetts leading the north, in the same breath; and who, neither from prepossession in favor of his native community or resentment because of attack upon it by those of the other section, had ever been removed out of brotherly love for all his countrymen alike. If you can do an all-important thing for your fellows which you believe no one else can do, and are without ambition for opportunity, are you not a poor grovelling creature? Webster, knowing that secession could not be peaceable, and seeing it become more and more probable, racked with fears for the union, and aghast at the menace of fraternal bloodshed, like Calhoun, he cheated himself with a futile remedy. We have told you of Calhoun's proposal to disarm the combatants. In his amiability Webster believed with his whole soul that he could as president make his countrymen love one another as he himself loved them, and that he could pour upon the waters now beginning to rage oil enough to safe the ship of union through the tempest soon to be at its height. It was an aspiration high and holy, deserving of eternal honor from all America. You cannot read this great speech of March 7 aright if you do not discern that Webster was seriously alarmed. When you see that a dear one's malady is fatal, you will not confess it to others,--not even to yourself. His excited exclamations, "No, sir! no, sir! There will be no secession! Gentlemen are not serious when they talk of secession," cannot deceive a reader whose wont it has been to look into his own heart. Webster did not see the future with the superhuman prevision of Calhoun; but he had observed the course of things in that stormy session. Is it to be believed that he had overlooked the tremendous significance of Toombs's speech of December 13, and of the wild plaudits it brought from the southern members? And try to conceive what must have been the effect upon him of that most solemn and the saddest great speech in all oratory of Calhoun just three days before. Read the 7th of March speech by its circumstances and it is revealed to you, as by a flashlight, that Webster had peeped behind the curtain which he had prayed should never rise in his lifetime. Horror-struck as he was, he would not despair of his country,--he would not believe that the brothers' union was about to turn into a brothers' war.