But Macaulay, in another article, makes a point against the leaders of party themselves.  His definition of Parliamentary government is “government by speaking”; and he declares that the most effective speakers are commonly ill-informed, shallow in thought, devoid of large ideas of legislation, hazarding the loosest speculations with the utmost intellectual impudence, and depending for success on volubility of speech, rather than on accuracy of knowledge or penetration of intelligence.  “The tendency of institutions like those of England,” he adds, “is to encourage readiness in public men, at the expense both of fulness and of exactness.  The keenest and most vigorous minds of every generation, minds often admirably fitted for the investigation of truth, are habitually employed in producing arguments such as no man of sense would ever put into a treatise intended for publication, arguments which are just good enough to be used once, when aided by fluent delivery and pointed language.”  And he despairingly closes with the remark, that he “would sooner expect a great original work on political science, such a work, for example, as the Wealth of Nations, from an apothecary in a country town, or from a minister in the Hebrides, than from a statesman who, ever since he was one-and-twenty, had been a distinguished debater in the House of Commons.”

Now it is plain that neither of these contemptuous judgments applies to Webster.  He was a great lawyer; but as a legislator the precedents of the lawyer did not control the action or supersede the principles of the statesman.  He was one of the most formidable debaters that ever appeared in a legislative assembly; and yet those who most resolutely grappled with him in the duel of debate would be the last to impute to him inaccuracy of knowledge or shallowness of thought.  He carried into the Senate of the United States a trained mind, disciplined by the sternest culture of his faculties, disdaining any plaudits which were not the honest reward of robust reasoning on generalized facts, and “gravitating” in the direction of truth, whether he hit or missed it.  In his case, at least, there was nothing in his legal experience, or in his legislative experience, which would have unfitted him for producing a work on the science of politics.  The best speeches in the House of Commons of Lord Palmerston and Lord John Russell appear very weak indeed, as compared with the Reply to Hayne, or the speech on “The Constitution not a Compact between Sovereign States,” or the speech on the President’s Protest.

In this connection it may be said, when we remember the hot contests between the two men, that there is something plaintive in Calhoun’s dying testimony to Webster’s austere intellectual conscientiousness.  Mr. Venables, who attended the South Carolina statesman in his dying hours, wrote to Webster:  “When your name was mentioned he remarked that ’Mr. Webster has as high a standard of truth as any statesman