He would observe the law of contracts.  Yet no man in the nation was more impatient than he at the threats of secession.  He foretold that secession would lead to war.  And if Mr. Webster had lived to see the war of which he had such anxious prescience, I firmly believe that he would have marched under the banner of the North with patriotism equal to any man.  He would have been where Mr. Everett was.  One of his own sons was slain in that war.  He was not a Northern man with Southern principles; his whole life attested his Northern principles.  There never was a time when he was not hated and mistrusted by the Southern leaders.  It is not a proof that he was Southern in his sympathies because he was not an Abolitionist; and by an Abolitionist I mean what was meant thirty years ago,—­one who was unscrupulously bent on removing slavery by any means, good or bad; since slavery, in his eyes, was a malum per se, not a misfortune, an evil, a sin, but a crime to be washed out by the besom of destruction.

Mr. Webster did not sympathize with these extreme views.  He was not a reformer; but that does not show that he was unpatriotic, or a Southern man in his heart.  “The higher law,” to him, was the fulfilment of a contract; the maintenance of promises made in good faith, whether those promises were wise or foolish; the observance of laws so long as they were laws.  There was, undeniably, a great evil and shame to be removed, but he was not responsible for it; and he left that evil in the hands of Him who said, “Vengeance is mine, I will repay,”—­as He did repay in four years’ devastations, miseries, and calamities, and these so awful, so unexpected, so ill-prepared for, that a thoughtful and kind-hearted person, in view of them, will weep rather than rejoice; for it is not pleasant to witness chastisements and punishments, even if necessary and just, unless the people who suffer are fiends and incarnate devils, as very few men are.  Human nature is about the same everywhere, and individuals and nations peculiarly sinful are generally made so by their surroundings and circumstances.  The reckless people of frontier mining districts are not naturally worse than adventurers in New York or Philadelphia; nor is any vulgar and ignorant man, in any part of the country, suddenly made rich, probably any coarser in his pleasures, or more sensual in his appearance, or more profane in his language, than was Vitellius, or Heliogabalus, or Otho, on an imperial throne.

But even suppose Mr. Webster, in the decline of his life, intoxicated by his magnificent position or led astray by ambition, made serious political errors.  What then?  All great men have made errors, both in judgment and in morals,—­Caesar, when he crossed the Rubicon; Theodosius, when he slaughtered the citizens of Thessalonica; Luther, when he quarrelled with Zwingli; Henry IV., when he stooped at Canossa; Elizabeth, when she executed Mary Stuart; Cromwell, when he bequeathed absolute power to his son; Bacon,