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Show 200 'flU~ LIU};nn' DELL. blest friends l\Ir. W cbstcr stooped to persecute with tho pettiest malignity, was reelected by in~ creased majorities. A li'rcc Soil Senator succeeded to his own chair : Massachusetts recoiled from the party that had owned l1cr for fifty years : Syracuse laughed him to special scorn : no single vote, south of :Mason and Dixon's line, could be begged to do him even tho empty honor of a nomination: while, for political adherents,· he fell into hands which b:wc linked his name only with ridicule. What is greatness in statesmanship? It is, in one form, by instinctive sympathy or preeminent ability, to understand and guide your own times: in another form, it is to outrun your own age, and mould the futuro. Ilad Webster either of these? Did he understand or guide his own age, who was always only first among the laggards? whose friends boast for him, as proof of "prn.ctical statesmanship," that he so often sacrificed his con vic· tions to popular opinion? and yet who, strangely awkward, always contrived to make the sacrifice 201 just whon the own opinion? people were cmuing round to his Did he foresee or mould tl f T te uture, who was never o.~olm tho Baptist b t ' ' u always Caiaphas . l timid counsel that this man ' Wit ' f -ever some bearer o a new gospel- should 1' I , . c w, est the whole nation per1sh ? who dropped £ h . . rom t c revised edition of Ius works h1s best Anti-S! , a' cry SJ)Ccchcs, at the very moment when looming on the horizon was that great movement against Slave . ' ry • 50 momentous that before It all American rr t . • • IS ory smce the Revolu-tion IS destined to pale and fade .".. w,. ty.? To bo a great American one must I ' tavc a glad sublime, and fearless faith in tl e I . ' 1 peop e, m tho safety of trustiug them with the , G 11 own · overnmeut and Institutions. None of l\fr · W e bs ter ' s speeches arc h.o peful ' but of 1u t e years ho seems to have bad 110 fatth at all. He was, without doubt, a great Jurist. l3ut how much of his constitutional lore he owed to Story, we shall never lmo\v tJ'Il h' ·IS friends arc |