The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster / With an Essay on Daniel Webster as a Master of English Style

by Daniel Webster; Edwin Percy Whipple

Now, in simple truth, the speech is the most masterly statement of facts, relating to the oppression of millions of the people of India, which was ever forced on the attention of the House of Commons,—a legislative assembly which, it may be incidentally remarked, was practically responsible for the just government of the immense Indian empire of Great Britain. It is curious that the main facts on which the argument of Burke rests have been confirmed by James Mill, the coldest-blooded historian that ever narrated the enormous crimes which attended the rise and progress of the British power in Hindostan, and a man who also had a strong intellectual antipathy to the mind of Burke. In making the speech, Burke had documentary evidence of a large portion of the transactions he denounced, and had divined the rest. Mill supports him both as regards the facts of which Burke had positive knowledge, and the facts which he deductively inferred from the facts he knew. Having thus a strong foundation for his argument, he exerted every faculty of his mind, and every impulse of his moral sentiment and moral passion, to overwhelm the leading members of the administration of Pitt, by attempting to make them accomplices in crimes which would disgrace even slave-traders on the Guinea coast. The merely intellectual force of his reasoning is crushing; his analysis seems to be sharpened by his hatred; and there is no device of contempt, scorn, derision, and direct personal attack, which he does not unsparingly use. In the midst of all this mental tumult, inestimable maxims of moral and political wisdom are shot forth in short sentences, which have so much of the sting and brilliancy of epigram, that at first we do not appreciate their depth of thought; and through all there burns such a pitiless fierceness of moral reprobation of cruelty, injustice, and wrong, that all the accredited courtesies of debate are violated, once, at least, in every five minutes. In any American legislative assembly he would have been called to order at least once in five minutes. The images which the orator brings in to give vividness to his argument are sometimes coarse; but, coarse as they are, they admirably reflect the moral turpitude of the men against whom he inveighs. Among these is the image with which he covers Dundas, the special friend of Pitt, with a ridicule which promises to be immortal. Dundas, on the occasion when Fox and Burke called for papers by the aid of which they proposed to demonstrate the iniquity of the scheme by which the ministry proposed to settle the debts of the Nabob of Arcot, pretended that the production of such papers would be indelicate,—"that this inquiry is of a delicate nature, and that the state will suffer detriment by the exposure of this transaction." As Dundas had previously brought out six volumes of Reports, generally confirming Burke's own views of the corruption and oppression which marked the administration of affairs in India, he laid himself open to Burke's celebrated assault. Dundas and delicacy, he said, were "a rare and singular coalition." And then follows an image of colossal coarseness, such as might be supposed capable of rousing thunder-peals of laughter from a company of festive giants,—an image which Lord Brougham declared offended his sensitive taste,—the sensitive taste of one of the most formidable legal and legislative bullies that ever appeared before the juries or Parliament of Great Britain, and who never hesitated to use any illustration, however vulgar, which he thought would be effective to degrade his opponents.

But whatever may be thought of the indelicacy of Burke's image, it was one eminently adapted to penetrate through the thick hide of the minister of state at whom it was aimed, and it shamed him as far as a profligate politician like Dundas was capable of feeling the sensation of shame. But there are also flashes, or rather flames, of impassioned imagination, in the same speech, which rush up from the main body of its statements and arguments, and remind us of nothing so much as of those jets of incandescent gas which, we are told by astronomers, occasionally leap, from the extreme outer covering of the sun, to the height of a hundred or a hundred and sixty thousand miles, and testify to the terrible forces raging within it. After reading this speech for the fiftieth time, the critic cannot free himself from the rapture of admiration and amazement which he experienced in his first fresh acquaintance with it. Yet its delivery in the House of Commons (February 28, 1785) produced an effect so slight, that Pitt, after a few minutes' consultation with Grenville, concluded that it was not worth the trouble of being answered; and the House of Commons, obedient to the Prime Minister's direction, negatived, by a large majority, the motion in advocating which Burke poured out the wonderful treasures of his intellect and imagination. To be sure, the House was tired to death with the discussion, was probably very sleepy, and the orator spoke five hours after the members had already shouted, "Question! Question!"

The truth is, that this speech, unmatched though it is in the literature of eloquence, had not, as has been previously stated, the air of reality. It struck the House as a magnificent Oriental dream, as an Arabian Nights' Entertainment, as a tale told by an inspired madman, "full of sound and fury, signifying nothing"; and the evident partisan intention of the orator to blast Pitt's administration by exhibiting its complicity in one of the most enormous frauds recorded in history, confirmed the dandies, the cockneys, the bankers, and the country gentlemen, who, as members of the House of Commons, stood by Pitt with all the combined force of their levity, their venality, and their stupidity, in the propriety of voting Burke down. And even now, when the substantial truth of all the facts he alleged is established on evidence which convinces historians, the admiring reader can understand why it failed to convince Burke's contemporaries, and why it still appears to lack the characteristics of a speech thoroughly organized. Indeed, the mind of Burke, when it was delivered, can only be compared to a volcanic mountain in eruption;—not merely a volcano like that of Vesuvius, visited by scientists and amateurs in crowds, when it deigns to pour forth its flames and lava for the entertainment of the multitude; but a lonely volcano, like that of Etna, rising far above Vesuvius in height, far removed from all the vulgar curiosity of a body of tourists, but rending the earth on which it stands with the mighty earthquake throes of its fiery centre and heart. The moral passion,—perhaps it would be more just to say the moral fury,—displayed in the speech, is elemental, and can be compared to nothing less intense than the earth's interior fire and heat.

Now in Webster's great legislative efforts, his mind is never exhibited in a state of eruption. In the most excited debates in which he bore a prominent part, nothing strikes us more than the admirable self-possession, than the majestic inward calm, which presides over all the operations of his mind and the impulses of his sensibility, so that, in building up the fabric of his speech, he has his reason, imagination, and passion under full control,—using each faculty and feeling as the occasion may demand, but never allowing himself to be used by it,—and always therefore conveying the impression of power in reserve, while he may, in fact, be exercising all the power he has to the utmost. In laboriously erecting his edifice of reasoning he also studiously regards the intellects and the passions of ordinary men; strives to bring his mind into cordial relations with theirs; employs every faculty he possesses to give reality, to give even visibility, to his thoughts; and though he never made a speech which rivals that of Burke on the Nabob of Arcot's Debts, in respect to grasp of understanding, astounding wealth of imagination and depth of moral passion, he always so contrived to organize his materials into a complete whole, that the result stood out clearly to the sight of the mind, as a structure resting on strong foundations, and reared to due height by the mingled skill of the artisan and the artist. When he does little more than weld his materials together, he is still an artificer of the old school of giant workmen, the school that dates its pedigree from Tubal Cain.

After all this wearisome detail and dilution of the idea attempted to be expressed, it may be that I have failed to convey an adequate impression of what constitutes Webster's distinction among orators, as far as orators have left speeches which are considered an invaluable addition to the literature of the language in which they were originally delivered. Everybody understands why any one of the great sermons of Jeremy Taylor, or the sermon of Dr. South on "Man created in the Image of God," or the sermon of Dr. Barrow on "Heavenly Rest," differs from the millions on millions of doubtless edifying sermons that have been preached and printed during the last two centuries and a half; but everybody does not understand the distinction between one brilliant oration and another, when both made a great sensation at the time, while only one survived in literature. Probably Charles James Fox was a more effective speaker in the House of Commons than Edmund Burke, probably Henry Clay was a more effective speaker in Congress than Daniel Webster; but when the occasions on which their speeches were made are found gradually to fade from the memory of men, why is it that the speeches of Fox and Clay have no recognized position in literature, while those of Burke and Webster are ranked with literary productions of the first class? The reason is as really obvious as that which explains the exceptional value of some of the efforts of the great orators of the pulpit. Jeremy Taylor, Dr. South, and Dr. Barrow, different as they were in temper and disposition, succeeded in "organizing" some masterpieces in their special department of intellectual and moral activity; and the same is true of Burke and Webster in the departments of legislation and political science. The "occasion" was merely an opportunity for the consolidation into a speech of the rare powers and attainments, the large personality and affluent thought, which were the spiritual possessions of the man who made it,—a speech which represented the whole intellectual manhood of the speaker,—a manhood in which knowledge, reason, imagination, and sensibility were all consolidated under the directing power of will.

A pertinent example of the difference we have attempted to indicate may be easily found in contrasting Fox's closing speech on the East India Bill with Burke's on the same subject. For immediate effect on the House of Commons, it ranks with the most masterly of Fox's Parliamentary efforts. The hits on his opponents were all "telling." The argumentum ad hominem, embodied in short, sharp statements, or startling interrogatories, was never employed with more brilliant success. The reasoning was rapid, compact, encumbered by no long enumeration of facts, and, though somewhat unscrupulous here and there, was driven home upon his adversaries with a skill that equalled its audacity. It may be said that there is not a sentence in the whole speech which was not calculated to sting a sleepy audience into attention, or to give delight to a fatigued audience which still managed to keep its eyes and minds wide open. Even in respect to the principles of liberty and justice, which were the animating life of the bill, Fox's terse sentences contrast strangely with the somewhat more lumbering and elaborate paragraphs of Burke. "What," he exclaims, putting his argument in his favorite interrogative form,—"what is the most odious species of tyranny? Precisely that which this bill is meant to annihilate. That a handful of men, free themselves, should exercise the most base and abominable despotism over millions of their fellow-creatures; that innocence should be the victim of oppression; that industry should toil for rapine; that the harmless laborer should sweat, not for his own benefit, but for the luxury and rapacity of tyrannic depredation;—in a word, that thirty millions of men, gifted by Providence with the ordinary endowments of humanity, should groan under a system of despotism unmatched in all the histories of the world? What is the end of all government? Certainly, the happiness of the governed. Others may hold different opinions; but this is mine, and I proclaim it. What, then, are we to think of a government whose good fortune is supposed to spring from the calamities of its subjects, whose aggrandizement grows out of the miseries of mankind? This is the kind of government exercised under the East Indian Company upon the natives of Hindostan; and the subversion of that infamous government is the main object of the bill in question." And afterwards he says, with admirable point and pungency of statement: "Every line in both the bills which I have had the honor to introduce, presumes the possibility of bad administration; for every word breathes suspicion. This bill supposes that men are but men. It confides in no integrity; it trusts no character; it inculcates the wisdom of a jealousy of power, and annexes responsibility, not only to every action, but even to the inaction of those who are to dispense it. The necessity of these provisions must be evident, when it is known that the different misfortunes of the company have resulted not more from what their servants did, than from what the masters did not."

There is a directness in such sentences as these which we do not find in Burke's speech on the East India Bill; but Burke's remains as a part of English literature, and in form and substance, especially in substance, is so immensely superior to that of Fox, that, in quoting sentences from the latter, one may almost be supposed to rescue them from that neglect which attends all speeches which do not reach beyond the occasion which calls them forth. In Bacon's phrase, the speech of Fox shows "small matter, and infinite agitation of wit"; in Burke's, we discern large matter with an abundance of "wit" proper to the discussion of the matter, but nothing which suggests the idea of mere "agitation." Fox, in his speeches, subordinated every thing to the immediate impression he might make on the House of Commons. He deliberately gave it as his opinion, that a speech that read well must be a bad speech; and, in a literary sense, the House of Commons, which he entered before he was twenty, may be called both the cradle and the grave of his fame. It has been said that he was a debater whose speeches should be studied by every man who wishes "to learn the science of logical defence"; that he alone, among English orators, resembles Demosthenes, inasmuch as his reasoning is "penetrated and made red-hot by passion"; and that nothing could excel the effect of his delivery when "he was in the full paroxysm of inspiration, foaming, screaming, choked by the rushing multitude of his words." But not one of his speeches, not even that on the East India Bill, or on the Westminster Scrutiny, or on the Russian Armament, or on Parliamentary Reform, or on Mr. Pitt's Rejection of Bonaparte's Overtures for Peace, has obtained an abiding place in the literature of Great Britain. It would be no disparagement to an educated man, if it were said that he had never read these speeches; but it would be a serious bar to his claim to be considered an English scholar, if he confessed to be ignorant of the great speeches of Burke; for such a confession would be like admitting that he had never read the first book of Hooker's Ecclesiastical Polity, Bacon's Essays and Advancement of Learning, Milton's Areopagitica, Butler's Analogy, and Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations.

When we reflect on the enormous number of American speeches which, when they were first delivered, were confidently predicted, by appreciating friends, to insure to the orators a fame which would be immortal, one wonders a little at the quiet persistence of the speeches of Webster in refusing to die with the abrupt suddenness of other orations, which, at the time of their delivery, seemed to have an equal chance of renown. The lifeless remains of such unfortunate failures are now entombed in that dreariest of all mausoleums, the dingy quarto volumes, hateful to all human eyes, which are lettered on the back with the title of "Congressional Debates,"—a collection of printed matter which members of Congress are wont to send to a favored few among their constituents, and which are immediately consigned to the dust-barrel or sold to pedlers in waste paper, according as the rage of the recipients takes a scornful or an economical direction. It would seem that the speeches of Webster are saved from this fate, by the fact that, in them, the mental and moral life of a great man, and of a great master of the English language, are organized in a palpable intellectual form. The reader feels that they have some of the substantial qualities which he recognizes in looking at the gigantic constructions of the master workmen among the crowd of the world's engineers and architects, in looking at the organic products of Nature herself, and in surveying, through the eye of his imagination, those novel reproductions of Nature which great poets have embodied in works which are indelibly stamped with the character of deathlessness.

But Webster is even more obviously a poet—subordinating "the shows of things to the desires of the mind"—in his magnificent idealization, or idolization, of the Constitution and the Union. By the magic of his imagination and sensibility he contrived to impress on the minds of a majority of the people of the free States a vague, grand idea that the Constitution was a sacred instrument of government,—a holy shrine of fundamental law, which no unhallowed hands could touch without profanation,—a digested system of rights and duties, resembling those institutes which were, in early times, devised by the immortal gods for the guidance of infirm mortal man; and the mysterious creatures, half divine and half human, who framed this remarkable document, were always reverently referred to as "the Fathers,"—as persons who excelled all succeeding generations in sagacity and wisdom; as inspired prophets, who were specially selected by Divine Providence to frame the political scriptures on which our political faith was to be based, and by which our political reason was to be limited. The splendor of the glamour thus cast over the imaginations and sentiments of the people was all the more effective because it was an effluence from the mind of a statesman who, of all other statesmen of the country, was deemed the most practical, and the least deluded by any misguiding lights of fancy and abstract speculation.

There can be little doubt that Webster's impressive idealization of the Constitution gave a certain narrowness to American thinking on constitutional government and the science of politics and legislation. Foreigners, of the most liberal views, could not sometimes restrain an expression of wonder, when they found that our most intelligent men, even our jurists and publicists, hardly condescended to notice the eminent European thinkers on the philosophy of government, so absorbed were they in the contemplation of the perfection of their own. When the great civil war broke out, hundreds of thousands of American citizens marched to the battle-field with the grand passages of Webster glowing in their hearts. They met death cheerfully in the cause of the "Constitution and Union," as by him expounded and idealized; and if they were so unfortunate as not to be killed, but to be taken captive, they still rotted to death in Southern prisons, sustained by sentences of Webster's speeches which they had declaimed as boys in their country schools. Of all the triumphs of Webster as a leader of public opinion, the most remarkable was his infusing into the minds of the people of the free States the belief that the Constitution as it existed in his time was an organic fact, springing from the intelligence, hearts, and wills of the people of the United States, and not, as it really was, an ingenious mechanical contrivance of wise men, to which the people, at the time, gave their assent.