an existing law, while his vanity and his self-assumption were so colossal that he did not hesitate to assert that he had the right and the power to declare an existing law, passed by Congress, approved by Madison, and held to be constitutional by an express decision of the Supreme Court, to be invalid, because he thought fit to say so.  To overthrow such doctrines was not difficult, but Mr. Webster refuted them with a completeness and force which were irresistible.  At the same time he avoided personal attack in the dignified way which was characteristic of him, despite the extraordinary temptation to indulge in invective and telling sarcasm to which Jackson by his ignorance and presumption had so exposed himself.  The bill was lost, the great conflict with the bank was begun, and the Whig party was founded.

Another event of a different character, which had occurred not long before, helped to widen the breach and to embitter the contest between the parties of the administration and of the opposition.  When in 1829 Mr. McLane had received his instructions as Minister to England, he had been directed by Mr. Van Buren to reopen negotiations on the subject of the West Indian trade, and in so doing the Secretary of State had reflected on the previous administration, and had said that the party in power would not support the pretensions of its predecessors.  Such language was, of course, at variance with all traditions, was wholly improper, and was mean and contemptible in dealing with a foreign nation.  In 1831 Mr. Van Buren was nominated as Minister to England, and came up for confirmation in the Senate some time after he had actually departed on his mission.  Mr. Webster opposed the confirmation in an eloquent speech full of just pride in his country and of vigorous indignation against the slight which Mr. Van Buren had put upon her by his instructions to Mr. McLane.  He pronounced a splendid “rebuke upon the first instance in which an American minister had been sent abroad as the representative of his party and not as the representative of his country.”  The opposition was successful, and Mr. Van Buren’s nomination was rejected.  It is no doubt true that the rejection was a political mistake, and that, as was commonly said at the time, it created sympathy for Mr. Van Buren and insured his succession to the presidency.  Yet no one would now think as well of Mr. Webster if, to avoid awakening popular sympathy and party enthusiasm in behalf of Mr. Van Buren, he had silently voted for that gentleman’s confirmation.  To do so was to approve the despicable tone adopted in the instructions to McLane.  As a patriotic American, above all as a man of intense national feelings, Mr. Webster could not have done otherwise than resist with all the force of his eloquence the confirmation of a man who had made such an undignified and unworthy exhibition of partisanship.  Politically he may have been wrong, but morally he was wholly right, and his rebuke stands in our history as a reproach which Mr. Van Buren’s subsequent success can neither mitigate nor impair.