of every charge that was made against him, and it was equally my pride and my pleasure to vindicate him in every form which lay within my power. [Applause.] No man who knew Daniel Webster, would have expected less of him.  Had our position been reversed, none such could have believed that he would with a view to a judgment ask whether a charge was made against a Massachusetts man or a Mississippian.  No! it belonged to a lower, a later, and I trust a shorter lived race of statesmen ["hear,” “hear,”] to measure all facts by considerations of latitude and longitude. [Warm applause.]

I honor that sentiment which makes us oftentimes too confident, and to despise too much the danger of that agitation which disturbs the peace of the country.  I honor that feeling which believes the Constitutional Union too strong to be shaken.  But at the same time I say, in sober judgment, it will not do to treat too lightly the danger which has beset and which still impends over us.  Who has not heard our Constitutional Union compared to the granite cliffs which line the sea and dash back the foam of the waves, unmoved by their fury.  Recently I have stood upon New England’s shore, and have seen the waves of a troubled sea dash upon the granite which frowns over the ocean, have seen the spray thrown back from the cliff, and the receding wave fret like the impotent rage of baffled malice.  But when the tide had ebbed, I saw that the rock was seamed and worn by the ceaseless beating of the sea, and fragments riven from the rock were lying on the beach.

Thus the waves of sectional agitation are dashing themselves against the granite patriotism of the land.  If long continued, that too must show the seams and scars of the conflict.  Sectional hostility must sooner or later produce political fragments.  The danger lies at your door, it is time to arrest it.  It is time that men should go back to the origin of our institutions.  They should drink the waters of the fountain, ascend to the source, of our colonial history.

You, men of Boston, go to the street where the massacre occurred in 1770.  There learn how your fathers unfaltering stood for community right.  And near the same spot mark how proudly the delegation of the democracy came to demand the removal of the troops from Boston, and how the venerable Samuel Adams stood asserting the rights of the people, dauntless as Hampden, clear and eloquent as Sidney.

All over our country these monuments, instructive to the present generation, of what our fathers felt and said and did, are to be found.  In the library of your association for the collection of your early history, I found a letter descriptive of the reading of the address to his army by Gen. Washington during one of those winters when he sought shelter for the ill clad, unshod, but victorious army with which he achieved the independence we enjoy; he had built a log cabin for a meeting house, and there reading his address, his sight failed him, he put on his glasses