right to men of less originality.  If he was never quite so great as all America took him to be, it was not for want of brains or of honesty, but because his consuming passion for the Union at all costs led him into the path of least apparent risk to it.  Twice as Secretary of State (that is, chiefly, Foreign Minister) he showed himself a statesman, but above all he was an orator and one of those rare orators who accomplish a definite task by their oratory.  In his style he carried on the tradition of English Parliamentary speaking, and developed its vices yet further; but the massive force of argument behind gave him his real power.  That power he devoted to the education of the people in a feeling for the nation and for its greatness.  As an advocate he had appeared in great cases in the Supreme Court.  John Marshall, the Chief Justice from 1801 to 1835, brought a great legal mind of the higher type to the settlement of doubtful points in the Constitution, and his statesmanlike judgments did much both to strengthen the United States Government and to gain public confidence for it.  It was a memorable work, for the power of the Union Government, under its new Constitution, lay in the grip of the Courts.  The pleading of the young Webster contributed much to this.  Later on Webster, and a school of followers, of whom perhaps we may take “our Elijah Pogram” to have been one, used ceremonial occasions, on which Englishmen only suffer the speakers, for the purpose of inculcating their patriotic doctrine, and Webster at least was doing good.  His greatest speech, upon an occasion to which we shall shortly come, was itself an event.  Lincoln found in it as inspiring a political treatise as many Englishmen have discovered in the speeches and writings of Burke.

Henry Clay was a slighter but more attractive person.  He was apparently the first American public man whom his countrymen styled “magnetic,” but a sort of scheming instability caused him after one or two trials to be set down as an “impossible” candidate for the Presidency.  As a dashing young man from the West he had the chief hand in forcing on the second war with Great Britain, from 1812 to 1814, which arose out of perhaps insufficient causes and ended in no clear result, but which, it is probable, marked a stage in the growth of loyalty to America.  As an older man he was famed as an “architect of compromises,” for though he strove for emancipation in his own State, Kentucky, and dreamed of a great scheme for colonising the slaves in Africa, he was supremely anxious to avert collision between North and South, and in this respect was typical of his generation.  But about 1830 he was chiefly known as the apostle of what was called the “American policy.”  This was a policy which aimed at using the powers of the national Government for the development of the boundless resources of the country.  Its methods comprised a national banking system, the use of the money of the Union on great