they have not, as yet, overcome the love of liberty, fidelity to true republican principles, and a sacred regard for the Constitution in that State whose soil was drenched to a mire by the first and best blood of the Revolution.”  Perhaps the peculiar power of Webster in condemning a measure by a felicitous epithet, such as that he employs in describing “the plunging spirit of party devotion,” was never more happily exercised.  In that word “plunging,” he intended to condense all his horror and hatred of a transaction which he supposed calculated to throw the true principles of constitutional government into a bottomless abyss of personal government, where right constitutional principles would cease to have existence, as well as cease to have authority.

There is one passage in his oration at the completion of the Bunker Hill Monument, which may be quoted as an illustration of his power of compact statement, and which, at the same time, may save readers from the trouble of reading many excellent histories of the origin and progress of the Spanish dominion in America, condensing, as it does, all which such histories can tell us in a few smiting sentences.  “Spain,” he says, “stooped on South America, like a vulture on its prey.  Every thing was force.  Territories were acquired by fire and sword.  Cities were destroyed by fire and sword.  Hundreds of thousands of human beings fell by fire and sword.  Even conversion to Christianity was attempted by fire and sword.”  One is reminded, in this passage, of Macaulay’s method of giving vividness to his confident generalization of facts by emphatic repetitions of the same form of words.  The repetition of “fire and sword,” in this series of short, sharp sentences, ends in forcing the reality of what the words mean on the dullest imagination; and the climax is capped by affirming that “fire and sword” were the means by which the religion of peace was recommended to idolaters, whose heathenism was more benignant, and more intrinsically Christian, than the military Christianity which was forced upon them.

And then, again, how easily Webster’s imagination slips in, at the end of a comparatively bald enumeration of the benefits of a good government, to vitalize the statements of his understanding!  “Everywhere,” he says, “there is order, everywhere there is security.  Everywhere the law reaches to the highest, and reaches to the lowest, to protect all in their rights, and to restrain all from wrong; and over all hovers liberty,—­that liberty for which our fathers fought and fell on this very spot, with her eye ever watchful, and her eagle wing ever wide outspread.”  There is something astonishing in the dignity given in the last clause of this sentence to the American eagle,—­a bird so degraded by the rhodomontade of fifth-rate declaimers, that it seemed impossible that the highest genius and patriotism could restore it to its primacy among the inhabitants of the air, and its just eminence as a symbol of American liberty.