The foregoing is intended to influence my readers to turn away from Von Holst, who wrote Calhoun's life, with the smoke and dust of the brothers' war still in his eyes, and from Trent, who merely says ditto to Mr. Burke, to Stephens, to the great Webster, to the touching "Carolina Tribute," to the happy and appreciative sketch of Pinkney, to the man himself and his grand career, in order to find the facts and principles by which one of America's very greatest ought to be judged. And I do hope that they now begin to discern that Calhoun was nothing at all of a doctrinaire, nor chop-logic, nor fanatic, nor professional politician, nor ignorant and over-zealous partisan, but was the very height of practical talent and an extraordinarily successful man of affairs, of more than Roman integrity, conscientious and diligent beyond almost all others in the duties of his place, and a foremost statesman of wide and profound culture. Whether I have accomplished my design or not, let me beg you to read for yourself with careful attention what Webster said of him in the United States senate just after his death. Remember two things as you read: (1) The speaker and the dead had been opposed to one another in politics for more than twenty years, the former being the great exponent of free-labor nationalization and the other the great exponent of slave-labor nationalization; (2) nobody ever weighed his public utterances more carefully than did Webster, and that he would not say anything which he did not believe, even as a politeness. Let us now try to follow with proper discernment this man whom we hope we have proved to be good and wise through his titanic defence of the cause which fate had decreed must fail. As our explanation of how evolution, and not the north on one side nor the south on the other, brought forward the crisis in which slavery, the sole menace of American dismemberment, was to perish, is so nearly complete, we can be much briefer in the rest of the chapter.