All wars of which we have any knowledge have consisted of two parts:  first, a war of words; secondly, the conflict of arms.  The war of words which issued in the late Rebellion began, in 1828, by the publication of Mr. Calhoun’s first paper upon Nullification, called the South Carolina Exposition; and it ended in April, 1861, when President Lincoln issued his call for seventy-five thousand troops, which excited so much merriment at Montgomery.  This was a period of thirty-three years, during which every person in the United States who could use either tongue or pen joined in the strife of words, and contributed his share either toward hastening or postponing the final appeal to the sword.  Men fight with one another, says Dr. Franklin, because they have not sense enough to settle their disputes in any other way; and when once they have begun, never stop killing one another as long as they have money enough “to pay the butchers.”  So it appeared in our case.  Of all the men who took part in this preliminary war of words, Daniel Webster was incomparably the ablest.  He seemed charged with a message and a mission to the people of the United States; and almost everything that he said in his whole life of real value has reference to that message and that mission.  The necessity of the Union of these States, the nature of the tie that binds them together, the means by which alone that tie can be kept strong,—­this was what he came charged to impart to us; and when he had fully delivered this message, he had done his work.  His numberless speeches upon the passing questions of the day,—­tariff, Bank, currency, Sub-treasury, and the rest,—­in which the partisan spoke rather than the man may have had their value at the time, but there is little in them of durable worth.  Those of them which events have not refuted, time has rendered obsolete.  No general principles are established in them which can be applied to new cases.  Indeed, he used often to assert that there were no general principles in practical statesmanship, but that the government of nations is, and must be, a series of expedients.  Several times, in his published works, can be found the assertion, that there is no such thing as a science of political economy, though he says he had “turned over” all the authors on that subject from Adam Smith to his own time.  It is when he speaks of the Union and the Constitution, and when he is rousing the sentiment of nationality, that he utters, not, indeed, eternal truths, but truths necessary to the existence of the United States, and which can only become obsolete when the nation is no more.