From 1800 the South had, to a great extent, directed the policies of the Republic, and, in the persons of Lowndes, Cheves and Calhoun, South Carolina had from 1813 to 1820 been a potent influence therein; but the Missouri Compromise and Taylor’s election over Lowndes in 1820, for the Speakership, marked the beginning of the change. No man saw it more clearly than the great man whom Taylor defeated. His views on the condition of affairs at this time is thus expressed by a contemporary: “The Northern people had outstripped the Southern and desired to see the offices of the Government in Northern hands. This inevitable result Mr. Lowndes saw clearly forty years ago, and thought it wise for the South to yield the hold she had so long possessed on political power, when she was no longer able to retain it.”[49] The clear judgment of Lowndes had revealed to him what the fatal brilliancy of Calhoun’s intellect prevented him from perceiving, viz.: that there could not be fashioned for the needs of imperfect humanity a perfectly symmetrical policy. Lowndes had brought Webster and Clay together and pushed through the tariff bill of 1816.[50] Of that bill in reply to the fierce criticism that it was the worst thing done since universal suffrage, he simply said, “neither was altogether good, but the best possible for the time.” “He thought some protection due to infant industries and that the question was, what measure of protection do they require?” He held; “We are obliged to leave some questions to posterity. We do our best with those that come to us and future generations must bear their share of the trouble.”[51] Accordingly, when the Baldwin bill of 1820 was brought forward, “he opposed it on the ground that the increased duties were not necessary.”[52] Before the tariff bill of 1824 could be presented, he had passed away; but in his place, to share with Webster, the honors of the splendid fight against it, South Carolina had sent up to Congress Robert Y. Hayne, by Benton extolled as: “Of all the young generation of statesmen coming on I consider him the safest, the most like William Lowndes, and best entitled to future eminent lead.”[53] How well Hayne lived up to this a study of his achievements exhibits. But while so good a judge as the late Edward M. Shepard, in his Life of Van Buren, ranks Hayne’s effort in the Senate, against the tariff of 1824, as fully up to, if not beyond, that of Webster in the House, scarcely any attention is paid to it by those historians who extoll the speech of Webster.