After this transcendent effort,—­perhaps the greatest of its kind ever made by man,—­Daniel Webster had nothing to gain in the esteem of the Northern States.  He was indisputably our foremost man, and in Massachusetts there was no one who could be said to be second to him in the regard of the people:  he was a whole species in himself.  In the subsequent winter of debate with Calhoun upon the same subject, he added many details to his argument, developed it in many directions, and accumulated a great body of constitutional reasoning; but so far as the people were concerned, the reply to Hayne sufficed.  In all those debates we are struck with his colossal, his superfluous superiority to his opponents; and we wonder how it could have been that such a man should have thought it worth while to refute such puerilities.  It was, however, abundantly worth while.  The assailed Constitution needed such a defender.  It was necessary that the patriotic feeling of the American people, which was destined to a trial so severe, should have an unshakable basis of intelligent conviction.  It was necessary that all men should be made distinctly to see that the Constitution was not a “compact” to which the States “acceded,” and from which they could secede, but the fundamental law, which the people had established and ordained, from which there could be no secession but by revolution.  It was necessary that the country should be made to understand that Nullification and Secession were one and the same; and that to admit the first, promising to stop short at the second, was as though a man “should take the plunge of Niagara and cry out that he would stop half-way down.”  Mr. Webster’s principal speech on this subject, delivered in 1832, has, and will ever have, with the people and the Courts of the United States, the authority of a judicial decision; and it might very properly be added to popular editions of the Constitution as an appendix.  Into the creation of the feeling and opinion which fought out the late war for the Union a thousand and ten thousand causes entered; every man who had ever performed a patriotic action, and every man who ever from his heart had spoken a patriotic word, contributed to its production; but to no man, perhaps, were we more indebted for it than to the Daniel Webster of 1830 and 1832.

We cannot so highly commend his votes in 1832 as his speeches.  General Jackson’s mode of dealing with nullification seems to us the model for every government to follow which has to deal with discontented subjects:—­1.  To take care that the laws are obeyed; 2.  To remove the real grounds of discontent.  This was General Jackson’s plan.  This, also, was the aim of Mr. Clay’s compromise.  Mr. Webster objected to both, on the ground that nullification was rebellion, and that no legislation respecting the pretext for rebellion should be entertained until the rebellion was quelled.  Thus he came out of the battle, dear to the thinking people of the country, but estranged from the three