Side by side with the anti-slavery sentiment was growing another sentiment--distinct from it, at first often in practical hostility to it, but at last blending with it for a common triumph. It was the sentiment of American nationality--the love of the Union. The separate colonies were brought together in the Revolution by a common peril and a common struggle. Then their tendency to fall apart was counteracted by the strong bond of the Constitution and the Federal government. Diverse interests and mutual distrust still tended to draw them asunder. With the continuance of the Union, the strengthening of the tie by use, the hallowing of old associations under the glamour of memory, and the growth of the new bonds of commerce and travel, the sense of a common country and destiny began to take root in the hearts of men, and on occasion disclosed itself with the strength and nobility of a heroic passion. True, a new rift was appearing, in the doctrine of nullification and the question of slavery, but this evoked at times a more militant and again a more appealing aspect in the sentiment of union. Jackson seemed to rise from the rough frontiersman to the guardian of the nation when he gave the word, "The Federal Union--it must be preserved!" Clay found the noblest exercise of his eloquence and his diplomacy in evoking the national spirit and in harmonizing the differences which threatened it. But the most stirring voice and effective leadership was that of Daniel Webster. As Webster is judged in the retrospect, we see that he was not so much a statesman, still less a moral idealist, as an advocate. His lucidity of statement and emotional power were not matched by constructive ability. His name is associated with no great measure of administration, no large and definite policy. He was luminous in statement rather than sagacious in judgment, an advocate rather than a judge. On the platform or in the Senate he was still pre-eminently the lawyer, in that, like a lawyer, he was the representative and exponent of established interests,--not the projector of new social adjustments. Civil law represents a vast accumulated experience and tradition of mankind; it has been slowly wrought out, as a regulation and adjustment of existing interests; with an effort toward equity, as understood by the best intelligence of each period, but always with immense regard for precedent and previous usage. It was in this spirit, highly conservative of what has already been secured, and extremely cautious toward radical change, that Webster habitually dealt with political institutions. It was characteristic of him that in the Massachusetts constitutional convention in 1820 he pleaded strongly for the retention of the property qualification of voters for State senators. But when the tide moved irresistibly toward manhood suffrage, he acquiesced.