408 DANIEL WEBSTER 



been adopted, would have gone far toward depriving it 

 of its most obnoxious and irritating features. By 

 adopting these measures of compromise, Mr. Webster 

 believed that the extension of slavery would have been 

 given its final limit, that the North would by reason 

 of its free labour increase in preponderance over the 

 South, and that by and by the institution of slavery, 

 hemmed in and denied further expansion, would die a 

 natural death. That these views were mistaken, the 

 events of the next ten years showed only too plainly ; 

 but how easy it is to be wise after the event, and how 

 completely the result of a great struggle, such as our 

 Civil War, casts into shadow the thoughts and motives 

 of men whose lives were ended before it began, can 

 only be well understood by the student whose view is 

 accustomed to range far and wide over the field of 

 history. In order to understand Mr. Webster's posi- 

 tion, we must put ourselves back, in imagination, to 

 that time when the doing away with that relic of bar- 

 barism, negro slavery, seemed as far off as the doing 

 away with its twin sister, protectionism, seems to many 

 of us to-day. Looking at Mr. Webster's acts in such 

 a spirit, there can be no doubt that the compromises 

 which he sustained had their practical value in post- 

 poning the inevitable conflict for ten years, during 

 which the relative strength of the North was increasing, 

 and a younger generation was growing up less tolerant 

 of slavery and more ready to discard palliatives and 

 achieve a radical cure. So far as Mr. Webster's moral 

 attitude was concerned, although he was not prepared 

 for the bitter hostility that his speech provoked in 

 many quarters, he must nevertheless have known that 

 it was quite as likely to injure him at the North as to 



