the struggle would result in the supremacy of liberty and the preservation of the Union; and it would be unjust to deny to him that foresight, statesmanship, and patriotism which the claim involves. It is true, indeed, that he did not anticipate the immediate abolition of slavery. His thoughts and policy contemplated only peaceful measures-first, the limitation of the system, and then the gradual emancipation of the slaves.

The compromise measures of 1850 gave the North ten years of time, and those years were years of preparation for the struggle of 1860 and the war of the rebellion.

In these ten years the public mind was educated and the body of the people were prepared for the solution of the problem, whether by peace or war. If the contest had been precipitated in 1850, the result might have been a division of the republic, and for the continent there would have been neither union nor liberty.

It is not just to Mr. Webster to assume that he builded better than he knew. He builded as he knew.

At the moment of his death his policy appeared to be acceptable to the country; but, in less than two years, old compromises were violated, and it was then idle and in vain to make appeals in behalf of the new. In the review we must admit

that the processes of compromise from the formation of the Constitution to the opening of the rebellion were calculated to preserve liberty and the Union, and, in the end, to render them one and inseparable.

The incidental results were disagreeable, but they were also temporary. The end was freedom for the continent, and a continent included within the limits of the Union. Thus liberty and the Union became one and inseparable.

For twenty years Mr. Webster was the chief personage in Massachusetts, in New England, in the republic. In politics he had competitors; but in diplomacy, in logical precision and force, in knowledge of the Constitution, in ability to deal with the gravest questions of law and statesmanship, in that genius by whose power he adorned whatever he said with an imagery as bold and magnificent as that of Milton and as true to nature as that of Shakespeare, he was without an equal or a rival. Wherever he stood, he was great; and the demand which he made for public consideration was based on that greatness.

Mr. Webster was not an unconscious bearer of a royal intellect, and at the end he was forced to look with something of contempt upon that public sentiment which advanced inferior men and denied to him the chiefest honor of the republic.

When Mr. Webster spoke at Plymouth in 1820, when he spoke in the Senate of 1830, there were men living who had heard Burke, and Fox, and Sheridan; and with them only, of all English-speaking orators, was he contrasted or compared. And if, for the moment, we can command the whole range of history, it is difficult to summon another orator who, in the Senate, and in the contest of 1830, could have met so completely the demand of the occasion, and justified his cause and the conduct of it to future ages. And if, again, for the moment we can command the whole range of history, can its ten great orators be named, and Mr. Webster be excluded from the list? Of those who have spoken the English language, he is inferior only to Burke; and if the position which Macaulay assigns to Burke shall be sustained by the continuing judg ment of mankind, then will Mr. Webster's countrymen claim for him the second place on the page of universal history.

An orator is not made by a single happy paragraph, nor born of one fortunate speech. He is to live in the public eye through a long period of time, and he must deal temperately, forcibly, persuasively, wisely, with a variety of questions touching the public interests or relating to the public welfare. All these conditions, and whatever else may be demanded

of the orator, were fully met in Mr. Webster's

career.

"Mr. Webster was great in intellect, majestic in his person, great in his friendships, great in his

enmities.

His fame rests upon the intellectual forces that he possessed, and the nature and extent of the uses to which they were applied. A public man can not choose his career. He must deal with the questions of his own generation. It was Mr. Webster's fortune to be called to the study and discussion of a new Constitution framed for a new people. In the main his views have been sustained by judicial decisions and sanctioned by the course of political events.

The virtue of a written constitution is in the interpretation given to it. Mr. Webster spoke for national life, for national power, for public honor, for public virtue.

His views of the Constitution are to be considered by all who shall study that Constitution and by all who are called to interpret it. He has thus become a worker in all the future of the republic.

The two great orators of antiquity pleaded the cause of dying states, but it was Mr. Webster's better fortune to aid in giving form and character to a young and growing nation.

PRESIDENT LINCOLN.

WHEN Anson Burlingame was in this country the last time, he gave me an account of his life in China, his relations with the principal personages there, and said, finally: "When I die they will erect monuments and temples to my memory. However much I may now protest, they will do that." This, we are told, the people and Government of China have done.

Gratitude to public benefactors is the common sentiment of mankind. It has found expression in every age; it finds expression in every condition of society. Monuments and temples seem to belong to the age of art rather than to the age of letters; but reflection teaches us that letters can not fully express the obligations of the learned even, to their chief benefactors, and only in a less degree can epitaphs, essays, and histories satisfy those who have not the opportunity and culture to read and understand them. Moreover, monuments and temples in honor of the dead express the sentiments of their contemporaries who sur