There are many indications that a speech by Daniel Webster in Portsmouth in 1810 excited as much expectation and comment as a speech by the same person in the Senate twenty years after.  But he was a mere Federalist partisan,—­no more.  It does not appear that he had anything to offer to his countrymen beyond the stately expression of party issues; and it was as a Federalist, pure and simple, that he was elected, in 1812, a member of the House of Representatives, after a keenly contested party conflict.  His majority over the Republican candidate was 2,546,—­the whole number of voters being 34,648.

The Federalists, from 1801 to 1825, were useful to the country only as an Opposition,—­just as the present Tory party in England can be only serviceable in its capacity of critic and holdback.  The Federalists under John Adams had sinned past forgiveness; while the Republican party, strong in being right, in the ability of its chiefs, in its alliance with Southern aristocrats, and in having possession of the government, was strong also in the odium and inconsistencies of its opponents.  Nothing could shake the confidence of the people in the administration of Thomas Jefferson.  But the stronger a party is, the more it needs an Opposition,—­as we saw last winter in Washington, when the minority was too insignificant in numbers and ability to keep the too powerful majority from doing itself such harm as might have been fatal to it but for the President’s well-timed antics.  Next to a sound and able majority, the great need of a free country is a vigorous, vigilant, audacious, numerous minority.  Better a factious and unscrupulous minority than none at all.  The Federalists, who could justly claim to have among them a very large proportion of the rich men and the educated men of the country, performed the humble but useful service of keeping an eye upon, the measures of the administration, and finding fault with every one of them.  Daniel Webster, however, was wont to handle only the large topics.  While Mr. Jefferson was struggling to keep the peace with Great Britain, he censured the policy as timorous, costly, and ineffectual; but when Mr. Madison declared war against that power, he deemed the act unnecessary and rash.  His opposition to the war was never carried to the point of giving aid and comfort to the enemy; it was such an opposition as patriotic “War Democrats” exhibited during the late Rebellion, who thought the war might have been avoided, and ought to be conducted more vigorously, but nevertheless stood by their country without a shadow of swerving.

He could boast, too, that from his boyhood to the outbreak of the war he had advocated the building of the very ships which gave the infant nation its first taste of warlike glory.  The Republicans of that time, forgetful of what Paul Jones and others of Dr. Franklin’s captains had done in the war of the Revolution, supposed that, because England had a thousand ships in commission, and America only seventeen, therefore an American ship could not venture out of a harbor without being taken.  We have often laughed at Colonel Benton’s ludicrous confession of his own terrors on this subject.