The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 1,778 pages of information about The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster.

The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 1,778 pages of information about The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster.
of the efforts of the great orators of the pulpit.  Jeremy Taylor, Dr. South, and Dr. Barrow, different as they were in temper and disposition, succeeded in “organizing” some masterpieces in their special department of intellectual and moral activity; and the same is true of Burke and Webster in the departments of legislation and political science.  The “occasion” was merely an opportunity for the consolidation into a speech of the rare powers and attainments, the large personality and affluent thought, which were the spiritual possessions of the man who made it,—­a speech which represented the whole intellectual manhood of the speaker,—­a manhood in which knowledge, reason, imagination, and sensibility were all consolidated under the directing power of will.

A pertinent example of the difference we have attempted to indicate may be easily found in contrasting Fox’s closing speech on the East India Bill with Burke’s on the same subject.  For immediate effect on the House of Commons, it ranks with the most masterly of Fox’s Parliamentary efforts.  The hits on his opponents were all “telling.”  The argumentum ad hominem, embodied in short, sharp statements, or startling interrogatories, was never employed with more brilliant success.  The reasoning was rapid, compact, encumbered by no long enumeration of facts, and, though somewhat unscrupulous here and there, was driven home upon his adversaries with a skill that equalled its audacity.  It may be said that there is not a sentence in the whole speech which was not calculated to sting a sleepy audience into attention, or to give delight to a fatigued audience which still managed to keep its eyes and minds wide open.  Even in respect to the principles of liberty and justice, which were the animating life of the bill, Fox’s terse sentences contrast strangely with the somewhat more lumbering and elaborate paragraphs of Burke.  “What,” he exclaims, putting his argument in his favorite interrogative form,—­“what is the most odious species of tyranny?  Precisely that which this bill is meant to annihilate.  That a handful of men, free themselves, should exercise the most base and abominable despotism over millions of their fellow-creatures; that innocence should be the victim of oppression; that industry should toil for rapine; that the harmless laborer should sweat, not for his own benefit, but for the luxury and rapacity of tyrannic depredation;—­in a word, that thirty millions of men, gifted by Providence with the ordinary endowments of humanity, should groan under a system of despotism unmatched in all the histories of the world?  What is the end of all government?  Certainly, the happiness of the governed.  Others may hold different opinions; but this is mine, and I proclaim it.  What, then, are we to think of a government whose good fortune is supposed to spring from the calamities of its subjects, whose aggrandizement grows out of the miseries of mankind?  This is the kind of government exercised under the East Indian

Copyrights
Project Gutenberg
The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.