There can be little doubt that Webster’s impressive idealization of the Constitution gave a certain narrowness to American thinking on constitutional government and the science of politics and legislation.  Foreigners, of the most liberal views, could not sometimes restrain an expression of wonder, when they found that our most intelligent men, even our jurists and publicists, hardly condescended to notice the eminent European thinkers on the philosophy of government, so absorbed were they in the contemplation of the perfection of their own.  When the great civil war broke out, hundreds of thousands of American citizens marched to the battle-field with the grand passages of Webster glowing in their hearts.  They met death cheerfully in the cause of the “Constitution and Union,” as by him expounded and idealized; and if they were so unfortunate as not to be killed, but to be taken captive, they still rotted to death in Southern prisons, sustained by sentences of Webster’s speeches which they had declaimed as boys in their country schools.  Of all the triumphs of Webster as a leader of public opinion, the most remarkable was his infusing into the minds of the people of the free States the belief that the Constitution as it existed in his time was an organic fact, springing from the intelligence, hearts, and wills of the people of the United States, and not, as it really was, an ingenious mechanical contrivance of wise men, to which the people, at the time, gave their assent.

The constitutions of the separate States of the Union were doubtless rooted in the habits, sentiments, and ideas of their inhabitants.  But the Constitution of the United States could not possess this advantage, however felicitously it may have been framed for the purpose of keeping, for a considerable period, peace between the different sections of the country.  As long, therefore, as the institution of negro slavery lasted, it could not be called a Constitution of States organically “United”; for it lacked the principle of growth, which characterizes all constitutions of government which are really adapted to the progressive needs of a people, if the people have in them any impulse which stimulates them to advance.  The unwritten constitution of Great Britain has this advantage, that a decree of Parliament can alter the whole representative system, annihilating by a vote of the two houses all laws which the Parliament had enacted in former years.  In Great Britain, therefore, a measure which any Imperial Parliament passes becomes at once the supreme law of the land, though it may nullify a great number of laws which previous Parliaments had passed under different conditions of the sentiment of the nation.  Our Constitution, on the other hand, provides for the contingencies of growth in the public sentiment only by amendments to the Constitution.  These amendments require more than a majority of all the political forces represented in Congress; and Mr. Calhoun, foreseeing that a collision