This false interpretation of Webster turns on two questions--was there a real danger of secession in 1850? Was Webster sincere in deriving his policy from a sense of national peril, not from self-interest? In the study which follows Professor Foster makes an adequate case for Webster, answering the latter question. The former he deals with in a general way establishing two things, the fact of Southern readiness to secede, the attendant fact that the South changed its attitude after the Seventh of March. His limits prevent his going on to weigh and appraise the sincerity of those fanatics who so furiously maligned Webster, who created the tradition that he had cynically sold out to the Southerners. Did they believe their own fiction? The question is a large one and involves this other, did they know what was going on in the South? Did they realize that the Union on March 6, 1850, was actually at a parting of the ways,--that destruction or Civil War formed an imminent issue? Many of those who condemned compromise may be absolved from the charge of insincerity on the ground that they did not care whether the Union was preserved or riot. Your true blue Abolitionist was very little of a materialist. Nor did he have primarily a crusading interest in the condition of the blacks. He was introspective. He wanted the responsibility for slavery taken off his own soul. As later events were to prove, he was also pretty nearly a pacifist; war for the Union, pure and simple, made no appeal to him. It was part of Webster's insight that he divined this, that he saw there was more pacifism than natural ardor in the North of 1850, saw that the precipitation of a war issue might spell the end of the United Republic. Therefore, it was to circumvent the Northern pacifists quite as much as to undermine the Southern expansionists that he offered compromise and avoided war.