or had withheld the publication of the repealing decree until war was declared, so that England might not have a pretext for rescinding the obnoxious orders.  Either horn of the dilemma, therefore, was disagreeable to the administration, and a disclosure could hardly fail to benefit the Federalists.  Mr. Webster supported his resolutions with a terse and simple speech of explanation, so far as we can judge from the meagre abstract which has come down to us.  The resolutions, however, were a firebrand, and lighted up an angry and protracted debate, but the ruling party, as Mr. Webster probably foresaw, did not dare to vote them down, and they passed by large majorities.  Mr. Webster spoke but once, and then very briefly, during the progress of the debate, and soon after returned to New Hampshire.  With the exception of these resolutions, he took no active part whatever in the business of the House beyond voting steadily with his party, a fact of which we may be sure because he was always on the same side as that staunch old partisan, Timothy Pickering.

After a summer passed in the performance of his professional duties, Mr. Webster returned to Washington.  He was late in his coming, Congress having been in session nearly three weeks when he arrived to find that he had been dropped from the Committee on Foreign Relations.  The dominant party probably discovered that he was a young man of rather too much promise and too formidable an opponent for such an important post.  His resolutions had been answered at the previous session, after his departure, and the report, which consisted of a lame explanation of the main point, and an elaborate defence of the war, had been quietly laid aside.  Mr. Webster desired debate on this subject, and succeeded in carrying a reference of the report to a committee of the whole, but his opponents prevented its ever coming to discussion.  In the long session which ensued, Mr. Webster again took comparatively little part in general business, but he spoke oftener than before.  He seems to have been reserving his strength and making sure of his ground.  He defended the Federalists as the true friends of the navy, and he resisted with great power the extravagant attempt to extend martial law to all citizens suspected of treason.  On January 14, 1814, he made a long and well reported speech against a bill to encourage enlistments.  This is the first example of the eloquence which Mr. Webster afterwards carried to such high perfection.  Some of his subsequent speeches far surpass this one, but they differ from it in degree, not in kind.  He was now master of the style at which he aimed.  The vehicle was perfected and his natural talent gave that vehicle abundance of thought to be conveyed.  The whole speech is simple in form, direct and forcible.  It has the elasticity and vigor of great strength, and glows with eloquence in some passages.  Here, too, we see for the first time that power of deliberate and measured sarcasm which was destined to become