Randolph.  The younger Republicans were disposed to a liberal, if not to a latitudinarian construction of the Constitution.  In short, they were Federalists and Hamiltonians, bank men, tariff men, internal-improvement men.  Then was afforded to the country the curious spectacle of Federalists opposing the measures which had been among the rallying-cries of their party for twenty years.  It was not in Daniel Webster’s nature to be a leader; it was morally impossible for him to disengage himself from party ties.  This exquisite and consummate artist in oratory, who could give such weighty and brilliant expression to the feelings of his hearers and the doctrines of his party, had less originating power, whether of intellect or of will, than any other man of equal eminence that ever lived.  He adhered to the fag end of the old party, until it was absorbed, unavoidably, with scarcely an effort of its own, in Adams and Clay.  From 1815 to 1825 he was in opposition, and in opposition to old Federalism revived; and, consequently, we believe that posterity will decide that his speeches of this period are the only ones relating to details of policy which have the slightest permanent value.  In fact, his position in Congress, as a member of a very small band of Federalists who had no hope of regaining power, was the next thing to being independent, and he made an excellent use of his advantage.

That Bank of the United States, for example, of which, in 1832, he was the ablest defender, and for a renewal of which he strove for ten years, he voted against in 1816; and for reasons which neither he nor any other man ever refuted.  His speeches criticising the various bank schemes of 1815 and 1816 were serviceable to the public, and made the bank, as finally established, less harmful than it might have been.

So of the tariff.  On this subject, too, he always followed,—­never led.  So long as there was a Federal party, he, as a member of it, opposed Mr. Clay’s protective, or (as Mr. Clay delighted to term it) “American system.”  When, in 1825, the few Federalists in the House voted for Mr. Adams, and were merged in the “conservative wing” of the Republican party, which became, in time, the Whig party, then, and from that time forward to the end of his life, he was a protectionist.  His anti-protection speech of 1824 is wholly in the modern spirit, and takes precisely the ground since taken by Ricardo, John Stuart Mill, and others of the new school.  It is so excellent a statement of the true policy of the United States with regard to protection, that we have often wondered it has been allowed to sleep so long in the tomb of his works.  And, oh! from what evils might we have been spared,—­nullification, surplus-revenue embarrassments, hot-bed manufactures, clothing three times its natural price,—­if the protective legislation of Congress had been inspired by the Webster of 1824, instead of the Clay!  Unimportant as this great speech may now seem, as