There is no occasion to discuss, or hold up to reprobation, Mr. Webster’s failings.  He was a splendid animal as well as a great man, and he had strong passions and appetites, which he indulged at times to the detriment of his health and reputation.  These errors may be mostly fitly consigned to silence.  But there was one failing which cannot be passed over in this way.  This was in regard to money.  His indifference to debt was perceptible in his youth, and for many years showed no sign of growth.  But in his later years it increased with terrible rapidity.  He earned twenty thousand a year when he first came to Boston,—­a very great income for those days.  His public career interfered, of course, with his law practice, but there never was a period when he could not, with reasonable economy, have laid up something at the end of every year, and gradually amassed a fortune.  But he not only never saved, he lived habitually beyond his means.  He did not become poor by his devotion to the public service, but by his own extravagance.  He loved to spend money and to live well.  He had a fine library and handsome plate; he bought fancy cattle; he kept open house, and indulged in that most expensive of all luxuries, “gentleman-farming.”  He never stinted himself in any way, and he gave away money with reckless generosity and heedless profusion, often not stopping to inquire who the recipient of his bounty might be.  The result was debt; then subscriptions among his friends to pay his debts; then a fresh start and more debts, and more subscriptions and funds for his benefit, and gifts of money for his table, and checks or notes for several thousand dollars in token of admiration of the 7th of March speech.[1] This was, of course, utterly wrong and demoralizing, but Mr. Webster came, after a time, to look upon such transactions as natural and proper.  In the Ingersoll debate, Mr. Yancey accused him of being in the pay of the New England manufacturers, and his biographer has replied to the charge at length.  That Mr. Webster was in the pay of the manufacturers in the sense that they hired him, and bade him do certain things, is absurd.  That he was maintained and supported in a large degree by New England manufacturers and capitalists cannot be questioned; but his attitude toward them was not that of servant and dependent.  He seems to have regarded the merchants and bankers of State Street very much as a feudal baron regarded his peasantry.  It was their privilege and duty to support him, and he repaid them with an occasional magnificent compliment.  The result was that he lived in debt and died insolvent, and this was not the position which such a man as Daniel Webster should have occupied.