Does this seem the language of one who had abandoned his post and was merely "bidding for the Presidency"?
The address of Hon. Rufus Choate, before the students of Dartmouth College, commemorative of Daniel Webster, has a remark on this subject so just that I cannot refrain from quoting it. He says: "Until the accuser who charges Mr. Webster with having 'sinned against his conscience' will assert that the conscience of a public man may not, must not, be instructed by profound knowledge of the vast subject-matter with which public life is conversant, and will assert that he is certain that the consummate science of our great statesman was felt by himself to prescribe to his morality another conduct than that which he adopted, and that he thus consciously outraged that 'sense of duty which pursues us ever,'--is he not inexcusable, whoever he is, that so judges another?"
At the meeting held in Faneuil Hall, Oct. 27, 1852, commemorative of Mr. Webster's life and work, Mr. Edward Everett said: "Whoever, in after time, shall write the history of the United States for the last forty years will write the life of Daniel Webster; and whoever writes the life of Daniel Webster as it ought to be written will write the history of the Union from the time he took a leading part in its concerns." Mr. Choate, at a meeting of the Supreme Court of Massachusetts, Oct. 25, 1852, said: "Happier than the younger Pliny, happier than Cicero, he has found his historian, unsolicited, in his lifetime, and his countrymen have him all by heart."
If this volume shall aid in bringing the young of this generation "to have him all by heart," to ascend his imaginative heights and sit under the shadow of his profound reflections on that which is fundamental in civil and religious liberty, its purpose will be accomplished.
With few exceptions these selections are given entire. Whenever they have been abridged, the continuity of the discourse has not been impaired.
In the matter of annotation the purpose has been to furnish sufficient aid to the general reader, and at the same time to indicate to the special student lines along which he may study the speeches.
In Edward Everett's Memoir, found in the first volume of Mr. Webster's works; in the life of Mr. Webster by George Tichnor Curtis, and in Henry Cabot Lodge's Daniel Webster, in the American Statesman Series, the student has exhaustive, scholarly, and judicious estimates of Mr. Webster's work.
I am indebted to the Hon. George F. Hoar and the Hon. Edward J. Phelps for assistance in the task of selecting representative speeches; and to the former for permission to associate his name with this edition of Mr. Webster's work.
A. J. G.
Brookline, November, 1892.