must eventually occur between the two sections, carried with him, not only the South, but a considerable minority of the North, in resisting any attempt to limit the extension of slavery.  On this point the passions and principles of the people of the slave-holding and the majority of the people of the non-slave-holding States came into violent opposition; and there was no possibility that any amendment to the Constitution could be ratified, which would represent either the growth of the Southern people in their ever-increasing belief that negro slavery was not only a good in itself, but a good which ought to be extended, or the growth of the Northern people in their ever-increasing hostility both to slavery and its extension.  Thus two principles, each organic in its nature, and demanding indefinite development, came into deadly conflict under the mechanical forms of a Constitution which was not organic.

A considerable portion of the speeches in this volume is devoted to denunciations of violations of the Constitution perpetrated by Webster’s political opponents.  These violations, again, would seem to prove that written constitutions follow practically the same law of development which marks the progress of the unwritten.  By a strained system of Congressional interpretation, the Constitution has been repeatedly compelled to yield to the necessities of the party dominant, for the time, in the government; and has, if we may believe Webster, been repeatedly changed without being constitutionally “amended.”  The causes which led to the most terrible civil war recorded in history were silently working beneath the forms of the Constitution,—­both parties, by the way, appealing to its provisions,—­while Webster was idealizing it as the utmost which humanity could come to in the way of civil government.  In 1848, when nearly all Europe was in insurrection against its rulers, he proudly said that our Constitution promised to be the oldest, as well as the best, in civilized states.  Meanwhile the institution of negro slavery was undermining the whole fabric of the Union.  The moral division between the South and North was widening into a division between the religion of the two sections.  The Southern statesmen, economists, jurists, publicists, and ethical writers had adapted their opinions to the demands which the defenders of the institution of slavery imposed on the action of the human intellect and conscience; but it was rather startling to discover that the Christian religion, as taught in the Southern States, was a religion which had no vital connection with the Christianity taught in the Northern States.  There is nothing more astounding, to a patient explorer of the causes which led to the final explosion, than this opposition of religions.  The mere form of the dogmas common to the religion of both sections might be verbally identical; but a volume of sermons by a Southern doctor of divinity, as far as he touched on the matter of slavery, was as different from one published by his Northern brother, in the essential moral and humane elements of Christianity, as though they were divided from each other by a gulf as wide as that which yawns between a Druid priest and a Christian clergyman.