It is also to be noted, that Webster here alludes to “the bird of freedom” only as it appears on the American silver dollar that passes daily from hand to hand, where the watchful eye and the outspread wing are so inartistically represented that the critic is puzzled to account for the grandeur of the image which the orator contrived to evolve from the barbaric picture on the ugliest and clumsiest of civilized coins.

The compactness of Webster’s statements occasionally reminds us of the epigrammatic point which characterizes so many of the statements of Burke.  Thus, in presenting a memorial to Congress, signed by many prominent men of business, against President Jackson’s system of finance, he saw at once that the Democrats would denounce it as another manifesto of the “moneyed aristocracy.”  Accordingly Webster introduced the paper to the attention of the Senate, with the preliminary remark:  “The memorialists are not unaware, that, if rights are attacked, attempts will be made to render odious those whose rights are violated.  Power always seeks such subjects on which to try its experiments.”  It is difficult to resist the impression that Webster must have been indebted to Burke for this maxim.  Again, we are deluded into the belief that we must be reading Burke, when Webster refers to the minimum principle as the right one to be followed in imposing duties on certain manufactures.  “It lays the impost,” he says, “exactly where it will do good, and leaves the rest free.  It is an intelligent, discerning, discriminating principle; not a blind, headlong, generalizing, uncalculating operation.  Simplicity undoubtedly, is a great beauty in acts of legislation, as well as in the works of art; but in both it must be a simplicity resulting from congruity of parts and adaptation to the end designed; not a rude generalization, which either leaves the particular object unaccomplished, or, in accomplishing it, accomplishes a dozen others also, which were not desired.  It is a simplicity wrought out by knowledge and skill; not the rough product of an undistinguishing, sweeping general principle.”

An ingenuous reader, who has not learned from his historical studies that men generally act, not from arguments addressed to their understandings, but from vehement appeals which rouse their passions to defend their seeming interests, cannot comprehend why Webster’s arguments against Nullification and Secession, which were apparently unanswerable, and which were certainly unanswered either by Hayne or Calhoun, should not have settled the question in debate between the North and the South.  Such a reader, after patiently following all the turns and twists of the logic, all the processes of the reasoning employed on both sides of the intellectual contest, would naturally conclude that the party defeated in the conflict would gracefully acknowledge the fact of its defeat; and, as human beings, gifted with the faculty of reason, would cheerfully