Not such was Webster.  He was too proud and too dignified for that form of degradation; and he perhaps sacrificed his popularity to his intellectual dignity, and the glorious consciousness of being a national benefactor,—­as a real statesman seeks to be, and is, when he falls back on the elemental principles of justice and morality, like a late Premier of England, one of the most conscientious statesmen that ever controlled the destinies of a nation.  Webster, like Burke, was haughty, austere, and brave; but such a man is not likely to remain the favorite of the people, who prefer an Alcibiades to a Cato, except in great crises, when they look to a man who can save them, and whom they can forget.

I cannot enumerate the magnificent bursts of eloquence which electrified the whole country when Webster stood out as the defender of the Constitution, when he combated secession and defended the Union.  How noble and gigantic he was when he answered the aspersions of the Southern orators,—­great men as they were,—­and elaborately showed that the Union meant something more than a league of sovereign States!  The great leaders of secession were overthrown in a contest which they courted, and in which they expected victory.  His reply to Hayne is, perhaps, the most masterly speech in American political history.  It is one of the immortal orations of the world, extorting praise and admiration from Americans and foreigners alike.  In his various encounters with Hayne, McDuffee, and Calhoun, he taught the principles of political union to the rising generation.  He produced those convictions which sustained the North in its subsequent contest to preserve the integrity of the Nation.  There can be no estimate of the services he rendered to the country by those grand and patriotic efforts.  But for these, the people might have succumbed to the sophistries of Calhoun; for he was almost as great a giant as Webster, and was more faultless in his private life.  He had an immense influence; he ruled the whole South; he made it solid.  The speeches of Webster in the Senate made him the oracle of the North.  He was not only the great champion of the North, and of Northern interests, but he was the teacher of the whole country.  He expounded the principles of the Constitution,—­that this great country is one, to be forever united in all its parts; that its stars and stripes were to float over every city and fortress in the land, from the Atlantic to the Pacific, from the river St. Lawrence to the Gulf of Mexico, and “bearing for their motto no such miserable interrogatory as, What are all these worth? nor those other words of delusion and folly, Liberty first and Union afterwards; but that other sentiment, dear to every American heart, Liberty and Union, now and forever, one and inseparable!”