change of feeling and opinion both at the North and the South in regard to slavery, and passed next to the question of mutual grievances.  He depicted at length the grievances of the South, including the tone of the Northern press, the anti-slavery resolutions of the Legislature, the utterances of the abolitionists, and the resistance to the Fugitive Slave Law.  The last, which he thought the only substantial and legally remediable complaint, he dwelt on at great length, and severely condemned the refusal of certain States to comply with this provision of the Constitution.  Then came the grievances of the North against the South, which were dealt with very briefly.  In fact, the Northern grievances, according to Mr. Webster, consisted of the tone of the Southern press and of Southern speeches which, it must be confessed, were at times a little violent and somewhat offensive.  The short paragraph reciting the unconstitutional and high-handed action of the South in regard to free negroes employed as seamen on Northern vessels, and the outrageous treatment of Mr. Hoar at Charleston in connection with this matter, was not delivered, Mr. Giddings says, but was inserted afterwards and before publication, at the suggestion of a friend.  After this came the fine burst about secession, and a declaration of faith that the Southern convention called at Nashville would prove patriotic and conciliatory.  The speech concluded with a strong appeal in behalf of nationality and union.

Mr. Curtis correctly says that a great majority of Mr. Webster’s constituents, if not of the whole North, disapproved this speech.  He might have added that that majority has steadily increased.  The popular verdict has been given against the 7th of March speech, and that verdict has passed into history.  Nothing can now be said or written which will alter the fact that the people of this country who maintained and saved the Union have passed judgment upon Mr. Webster and condemned what he said on the 7th of March, 1850, as wrong in principle and mistaken in policy.  This opinion is not universal,—­no opinion is,—­but it is held by the great body of mankind who know or care anything about the subject, and it cannot be changed or substantially modified, because subsequent events have fixed its place and worth irrevocably.  It is only necessary, therefore, to examine very briefly the grounds of this adverse judgment, and the pleas put in against it by Mr. Webster and by his most devoted partisans.

From the sketch which has been given of Mr. Webster’s course on the slavery question, we see that in 1819 and 1820 he denounced in the strongest terms slavery and every form of slave-trade; that while he fully admitted that Congress had no power to touch slavery in the States, he asserted that it was their right and their paramount duty absolutely to stop any further extension of slave territory.  In 1820 he was opposed to any compromise on this question.  Ten years later he stood out to the last, unaffected by defeat, against the principle of compromise which sacrificed the rights and the dignity of the general government to the resistance and threatened secession of a State.