But a large class regarded the Constitution as unsound, in some respects a wicked Constitution, since it recognized slavery as an institution.  By “the higher law,” they would sweep slavery away, perhaps by moral means, but by endless agitations, until it was destroyed.  Mr. Webster, I confess, did not like those agitations, since he knew they would end in war.  He had a great insight, such as few people had at that time.  But his prophetic insight was just what a large class of people did not like, especially in his own State.  He uttered disagreeable truths,—­as all prophets do,—­and they took up stones to stone him,—­to stone him for the bravest act of his whole life, in which a transcendent wisdom appeared, and which will be duly honored when the truth shall be seen.

The fact was, at that time Mr. Webster seemed to be a croaker, a Jeremiah, as Burke at one time seemed to his generation, when he denounced the recklessness of the French Revolution.  Very few people at the North dreamed of war.  It was never supposed that the Southern leaders would actually become rebels.  And they, on the other hand, never dreamed that the North would rise up solidly and put them down.  And if war were to happen, it was supposed that it would be brief.  Even so great and sagacious a statesman as Seward thought this.  The South thought that it could easily whip the Yankees; and the North thought that it could suppress a Southern rebellion in six weeks.  Both sides miscalculated.  And so, in spite of warnings, the nation drifted into war; but as it turned out in the end it seems a providential event, —­the way God took to break up slavery, the root and source of all our sectional animosities; a terrible but apparently necessary catastrophe, since more than a million of brave men perished, and more than five thousand millions of dollars were spent.  Had the North been wise, it would have compensated the South for its slaves.  Had the South been wise, it would have accepted the compensation and set them free, But it was not to be.  That issue could only be settled by the most terrible contest of modern times.

I will not dwell on that war, which Webster predicted and dreaded.  I only wish to show that it was not for want of patriotism that he became unpopular, but because he did not fall in with the prevailing passions of the day, or with the public sentiment of the North in reference to slavery, not as to its evils and wickedness, but as to the way in which it was to be opposed.  The great reforms of England, since the accession of William III., have been effected by using constitutional means,—­not violence, not revolution, not war; but by an appeal to reason and intelligence and justice.  No reforms in any nation have been greater and more glorious than those of the nineteenth century,—­all effected by constitutional methods.  Mr. Webster vainly attempted constitutional means.  He was a lawyer.  He reverenced the Constitution, with all its compromises.