[Illustration:  Webster]

Webster was the son of a New Hampshire farmer, who managed to send him to Dartmouth College, from which he graduated in 1801.  Four years later he was admitted to the bar at Boston, and in 1812 he was elected to Congress.  We find him at once violently opposing the second war with England, for which Clay was working so aggressively.  For ten years after that, he devoted himself to the practice of his profession, and soon became the foremost lawyer of New England, especially on constitutional questions.  In 1823, he was again sent to Congress; entered the Senate in 1828, and remained in public life practically until his death.

It was in 1830 that he delivered the speech already referred to—­perhaps the most remarkable ever heard within the walls of the Capitol.  Senator Hayne, of South Carolina, had made a remarkable address, lasting two days, advocating the right of a state to render null and void an unconstitutional law of Congress—­in other words, the right of secession from the Union.  Two days later, Webster rose to reply.  His appearance, always impressive, was unusually so that day; his argument, always close-knit and logical, was the very summation of these qualities; his words seemed edged with fire as he argued that the Constitution is supreme, the Union indissoluble, and that no state has, or can have the right to resist or nullify a national law.  It was the greatest oration of America’s greatest orator.

Of its effect upon the people who heard it we have spoken; throughout the country it produced a profound impression.  The North felt that a new prophet had arisen; the South, a new foeman.  The great advocate of nullification, however, was not Hayne, who would be scarcely remembered to-day but for the fact that it was to him Webster addressed his reply, but that formidable giant of a man, John C. Calhoun—­the man whom the South felt to be her peculiar representative on the question of state rights, of nullification, and, at last, of slavery.  His fate was one of the saddest in American history, for the cause he fought for was a doomed cause, and as he sank into his grave, he saw tottering down upon him the great structure which he had devoted his whole life to upholding.

Not much is known of Calhoun’s youth.  He was the grandson of an Irish immigrant who had settled in South Carolina, graduated from Yale in 1804, studied law, was admitted to the bar, and, returning to his native state, was, in 1811, elected a member of Congress.  That was the beginning of a public career which was to last until his death.

Almost from the first, he was consumed with an ambition to be President, and perhaps would have been, but for an incident so trivial that, under ordinary circumstances, it would have had no consequences.  In 1818, as Monroe’s secretary of war, Calhoun had occasion at a cabinet meeting to express some censure of Andrew Jackson’s conduct of the Seminole war—­a censure which was deserved, since Jackson had violated the law of nations in pursuing his enemy into a foreign country.  Twelve years later, when Jackson was President and Calhoun, as Vice-President, was in direct line of succession, so to speak, Jackson heard of Calhoun’s remarks, flew into a violent rage, came out as Calhoun’s declared enemy, and dealt the death-blow to his presidential aspirations.