opponents of slavery in a common condemnation.  It was wilful misrepresentation to talk of the Free-Soilers as if they were identical with the abolitionists, and no one knew better than Mr. Webster the distinction between the two, one being ready to secede to get rid of slavery, the other offering only a constitutional resistance to its extension.  His tone toward his opponents was correspondingly bitter.  When he first arrived in Boston, after his speech, and spoke to the great crowd in front of the Revere House, he said, “I shall support no agitations having their foundations in unreal, ghostly abstractions.”  Slavery had now become “an unreal, ghostly abstraction,” although it must still have appeared to the negroes something very like a hard fact.  There were men in that crowd, too, who had not forgotten the noble words with which Mr. Webster in 1837 had defended the character of the opponents of slavery, and the sound of this new gospel from his lips fell strangely on their ears.  So he goes on from one union meeting to another, and in speech after speech there is the same bitter tone which had been so foreign to him in all his previous utterances.  The supporters of the anti-slavery movement he denounces as insane.  He reiterates his opposition to slave extension, and in the same breath argues that the Union must be preserved by giving way to the South.  The feeling is upon him that the old parties are breaking down under the pressure of this “ghostly abstraction,” this agitation which he tries to prove to the young men of the country and to his fellow-citizens everywhere is “wholly factitious.”  The Fugitive Slave Law is not in the form which he wants, but still he defends it and supports it.  The first fruits of his policy of peace are seen in riots in Boston, and he personally advises with a Boston lawyer who has undertaken the cases against the fugitive slaves.  It was undoubtedly his duty, as Mr. Curtis says, to enforce and support the law as the President’s adviser, but his personal attention and interest were not required in slave cases, nor would they have been given a year before.  The Wilmot Proviso, that doctrine which he claimed as his own in 1847, when it was a sentiment on which Whigs could not differ, he now calls “a mere abstraction.”  He struggles to put slavery aside for the tariff, but it will not down at his bidding, and he himself cannot leave it alone.  Finally he concludes this compromise campaign with a great speech on laying the foundation of the capitol extension, and makes a pathetic appeal to the South to maintain the Union.  They are not pleasant to read, these speeches in the Senate and before the people in behalf of the compromise policy.  They are harsh and bitter; they do not ring true.  Daniel Webster knew when he was delivering them that that was not the way to save the Union, or that, at all events, it was not the right way for him to do it.