As the leader of a national party Mr. Clay failed utterly; for he was neither bad enough to succeed by foul means, nor skilful enough to succeed by fair means.  But in his character of patriot, orator, or statesman, he had some brilliant successes in his later years.  When Jackson was ready to concede all to the Nullifiers, and that suddenly, to the total ruin of the protected manufacturers, it was Clay’s tact, parliamentary experience, and personal power that interposed the compromise tariff, which reduced duties gradually instead of suddenly.  The Compromise of 1850, also, which postponed the Rebellion ten years, was chiefly his work.  That Compromise was the best then attainable; and we think that the country owes gratitude to the man who deferred the Rebellion to a time when the United States was strong enough to subdue it.

Posterity, however, will read the speeches of Mr. Clay upon the various slavery questions agitated from 1835 to 1850 with mingled feelings of admiration and regret.  A man compelled to live in the midst of slavery must hate it and actively oppose it, or else be, in some degree, corrupted by it.  As Thomas Jefferson came at length to acquiesce in slavery, and live contentedly with it, so did Henry Clay lose some of his early horror of the system, and accept it as a necessity.  True, he never lapsed into the imbecility of pretending to think slavery right or best, but he saw no way of escaping from it; and when asked his opinion as to the final solution of the problem, he could only throw it upon Providence.  Providence, he said, would remove the evil in its own good time, and nothing remained for men but to cease the agitation of the subject.  His first efforts, as his last, were directed to the silencing of both parties, but most especially the Abolitionists, whose character and aims he misconceived.  With John C. Calhoun sitting near him in the Senate-chamber, and with fire-eaters swarming at the other end of the Capitol, he could, as late as 1843, cast the whole blame of the slavery excitement upon the few individuals at the North who were beginning to discern the ulterior designs of the Nullifiers.  Among his letters of 1843 there is one addressed to a friend who was about to write a pamphlet against the Abolitionists.  Mr. Clay gave him an outline of what he thought the pamphlet ought to be.

“The great aim and object of your tract should be to arouse the laboring classes in the Free States against abolition.  Depict the consequences to them of immediate abolition.  The slaves, being free, would be dispersed throughout the Union; they would enter into competition with the free laborer, with the American, the Irish, the German; reduce his wages; be confounded with him, and affect his moral and social standing.  And as the ultras go for both abolition and amalgamation, show that their object is to unite in marriage the laboring white man and the laboring black man, and to reduce the white laboring man to the despised