“We are, sir, from principle and habit attached to the Union of these States. But our attachment is to the substance, and not to the form. It is to the good which this Union is capable of producing, and not to the evil which is suffered unnaturally to grow out of it. If the time should ever arrive when this Union shall be holden together by nothing but the authority of law; when its incorporating, vital principles shall become extinct; when its principal exercises shall consist in acts of power and authority, not of protection and beneficence; when it shall lose the strong bond which it hath hitherto had in the public affections; and when, consequently, we shall be one, not in interest and mutual regard, but in name and form only—we, sir, shall look on that hour as the closing scene of our country’s prosperity.
“We shrink from the separation of the States as an event fraught with incalculable evils, and it is among our strongest objections to the present course of measures that they have, in our opinion, a very dangerous and alarming bearing on such an event. If a separation of the States ever should take place, it will be on some occasion when one portion of the country undertakes to control, to regulate and to sacrifice the interest of another; when a small and heated majority in the Government, taking counsel of their passions, and not of their reason, contemptuously disregarding the interests and perhaps stopping the mouths of a large and respectable minority, shall by hasty, rash and ruinious measures, threaten to destroy essential rights, and lay waste the most important interests.
“It shall be our most fervent supplication to Heaven to avert both the event and the occasion; and the Government may be assured that the tie that binds us to the Union will never be broken by us.”
Even my young readers will be struck by the judicial calmness, the utter absence of heated partisanship, which mark the extracts I have made, and they will recall the passage well known to every schoolboy—the grand closing passage of the reply to Hayne.
As regards style it will be seen that, though yet a young man, Mr. Webster had made a very marked advance on the Fourth of July address which he delivered while yet a college-student. He was but thirty years old when the memorial was drafted, and in dignified simplicity and elevation of tone it was worthy of his later days. The young lawyer, whose time had hitherto been employed upon cases of trifling moment in a country town, had been ripening his powers, and expanding into the intellectual proportions of a statesman. It was evident at any rate that his neighbors thought so, for he was nominated as a Representative to the Thirteenth Congress, in due time elected, and, as has already been stated, he first took his seat at a special session called by the President on the 24th of May, 1813.
It was in this Congress that Daniel Webster made the acquaintance of two eminent men, with whose names his own is now most frequently associated—Henry Clay, of Kentucky, and John C. Calhoun, of South Carolina.
[CHAPTER XXII.]
MR. WEBSTER AS A MEMBER OF CONGRESS.
Before I proceed to speak of Mr. Webster’s Congressional career, I will make room for a professional anecdote, which carries with it an excellent lesson for my young readers.