The loss of the nomination was a bitter disappointment to Mr. Webster.  It was the fashion in certain quarters to declare that it killed him, but this was manifestly absurd.  The most that can be said in this respect was, that the excitement and depression caused by his defeat preyed upon his mind and thereby facilitated the inroads of disease, while it added to the clouds which darkened round him in those last days.  But his course of action after the convention cannot be passed over without comment.  He refused to give his adhesion to General Scott’s nomination, and he advised his friends to vote for Mr. Pierce, because the Whigs were divided, while the Democrats were unanimously determined to resist all attempts to renew the slavery agitation.  This course was absolutely indefensible.  If the Whig party was so divided on the slavery question that Mr. Webster could not support their nominee, then he had no business to seek a nomination at their hands, for they were as much divided before the convention as afterwards.  He chose to come before that convention, knowing perfectly well the divisions of the party, and that the nomination might fall to General Scott.  He saw fit to play the game, and was in honor bound to abide by the rules.  He had no right to say “it is heads I win, and tails you lose.”  If he had been nominated he would have indignantly and justly denounced a refusal on the part of General Scott and his friends to support him.  It is the merest sophistry to say that Mr. Webster was too great a man to be bound by party usages, and that he owed it to himself to rise above them, and refuse his support to a poor nomination and to a wrangling party.  If Mr. Webster could no longer act with the Whigs, then his name had no business in that convention at Baltimore, for the conditions were the same before its meeting as afterward.  Great man as he was, he was not too great to behave honorably; and his refusal to support Scott, after having been his rival for a nomination at the hands of their common party, was neither honorable nor just.  If Mr. Webster had decided to leave the Whigs and act independently, he was in honor bound to do so before the Baltimore convention assembled, or to have warned the delegates that such was his intention in the event of General Scott’s nomination.  He had no right to stand the hazard of the die, and then refuse to abide by the result.  The Whig party, in its best estate, was not calculated to excite a very warm enthusiasm in the breast of a dispassionate posterity, and it is perfectly true that it was on the eve of ruin in 1852.  But it appeared better then, in the point of self-respect, than four years before.  In 1848 the Whigs nominated a successful soldier conspicuous only for his availability and without knowing to what party he belonged.  They maintained absolute silence on the great question of the extension of slavery, and carried on their campaign on the personal popularity of their candidate.  Mr. Webster was righteously