help forward something, accomplish something.  It is not becoming in a full-grown man to utter melodious wind.  Nevertheless, it can be truly said of this splendid and irresistible oration, that it carries that kind of composition as far as we can ever expect to see it carried, even in this its native land.  What a triumphant joy it must have been to an audience, accustomed for three or four generations to regard preaching as the noblest work of man, keenly susceptible to all the excellences of uttered speech, and who now heard their plain old fathers and grandfathers praised in such massive and magnificent English!  Nor can it be said that this speech says nothing.  In 1820 it was still part of the industry of New England to fabricate certain articles required by slave-traders in their hellish business; and there were still descendants of the Pilgrims who were actually engaged in the traffic.

“If there be,” exclaimed the orator,

“within the extent of our knowledge or influence any participation in this traffic, let us pledge ourselves here, upon the rock of Plymouth, to extirpate and destroy it.  It is not fit that the land of the Pilgrims should bear the shame longer.  I hear the sound of the hammer, I see the smoke of the furnaces where manacles and fetters are still forged for human limbs.  I see the visages of those who by stealth and at midnight labor in this work of hell, foul and dark, as may become the artificers of such instruments of misery and torture.  Let that spot be purified, or let it cease to be of New England.”—­Works, Vol.  I. pp. 45, 46.

And he proceeds, in language still more energetic, to call upon his countrymen to purge their land of this iniquity.  This oration, widely circulated through the press, gave the orator universal celebrity in the Northern States, and was one of the many causes which secured his continuance in the national councils.

Such was his popularity in Boston, that, in 1824, he was re-elected to Congress by 4,990 votes out of 5,000; and such was his celebrity in his profession, that his annual retainers from banks, insurance companies, and mercantile firms yielded an income that would have satisfied most lawyers even of great eminence.

Those were not the times of five-thousand-dollar fees.  As late as 1819, as we see in Mr. Webster’s books, he gave “advice” in important cases for twenty dollars; his regular retaining fee was fifty dollars; his “annual retainer,” one hundred dollars; his whole charge for conducting a cause rarely exceeded five hundred dollars; and the income of a whole year averaged about twenty thousand dollars.  Twenty years later, he has gained a larger sum than that by the trial of a single cause; but in 1820 such an income was immense, and probably not exceeded by that of any other American lawyer.  Most lawyers in the United States, he once said, “live well, work hard, and die poor”; and this is particularly likely to be the case with lawyers who spend six months of the year in Congress.