There is one incident connected with this speech which proves what immense force is given to simple words when a great man—­great in his emotional nature as well as great in logical power—­is behind the words.  “It is, sir, as I have said, a small college.  And yet there are those who love it.”  At this point the orator’s lips quivered, his voice choked, his eyes filled with tears,—­all the memories of sacrifices endured by his father and mother, his brothers and sisters, in order that he might enjoy its rather scanty advantages of a liberal education, and by means of which he was there to plead its cause before the supreme tribunal of the nation, rushed suddenly upon his mind in an overwhelming flood.  The justices of the Supreme Court—­great lawyers, tried and toughened by experience into a certain obdurate sense of justice, and insensible to any common appeal to their hearts—­melted into unwonted tenderness, as, in broken words, the advocate proceeded to state his own indebtedness to the “small college,” whose rights and privileges he was there to defend.  Chief Justice Marshall’s eyes were filled with tears; and the eyes of the other justices were suffused with a moisture similar to that which afflicted the eyes of the Chief.  As the orator gradually recovered his accustomed stern composure of manner, he turned to the counsel on the other side,—­one of whom, at least, was a graduate of Dartmouth,—­and in his deepest and most thrilling tones, thus concluded his argument:  “Sir, I know not how others may feel; but for myself, when I see my Alma Mater surrounded, like Caesar in the senate-house, by those who are reiterating stab after stab, I would not, for this right hand, have her turn to me and say, Et tu quoque, mi fili!—­And thou too, my son.”  The effect was overwhelming; yet by what simple means was it produced, and with what small expenditure of words!  The eloquence was plainly “in the man, in the subject, and in the occasion,” but most emphatically was it in the MAN.

Webster’s extreme solicitude to make his style thoroughly Websterian—­a style unimitated because it is in itself inimitable—­is observable in the care he took in revising all his speeches and addresses which were published under his own authority.  His great Plymouth oration of 1820 did not appear in a pamphlet form until a year after its delivery.  The chief reason of this delay was probably due to his desire of stating the main political idea of the oration, that government is founded on property, so clearly that it could not be misconceived by any honest mind, and could only be perverted from its plain democratic meaning by the ingenious malignity of such minds as are deliberately dishonest, and consider lying as justifiable when lying will serve a party purpose.  It is probable that Webster would have been President of the United States had it not been for one short sentence in this oration,—­“Government is founded on property.”  It was of no use