FullReads

Daniel Webster undertook to defend the college. The speech which he made before the Supreme Court of the United States was a masterly effort.

“Sir,” he said, “you may destroy this little institution–it is weak, it is in your hands. I know it is one of the lesser lights in the literary horizon of our country. You may put it out.

“But if you do so, you must carry through your work! You must extinguish, one after another, all those greater lights of science which, for more than a century, have thrown their light over our land!”

He won the case; and this, more than anything else, helped to gain for him the reputation of being the ablest lawyer in the United States.

XII. WEBSTER’S GREAT ORATIONS.

In 1820, when he was thirty-eight years old, Daniel Webster was chosen to deliver an oration at a great meeting of New Englanders at Plymouth, Massachusetts.

Plymouth is the place where the Pilgrims landed in 1620. Just two hundred years had passed since that time, and this meeting was to celebrate the memory of the brave men and women who had risked so much to found new homes in what was then a bleak wilderness.

The speech which Mr. Webster delivered was one of the greatest ever heard in America. It placed him at once at the head of American orators.

John Adams, the second president of the United States, was then living, a very old man. He said, “This oration will be read five hundred years hence with as much rapture as it was heard. It ought to be read at the end of every century, and, indeed, at the end of every year, forever and ever.”

But this was only the first of many great addresses by Mr. Webster. In 1825, he delivered an oration at the laying of the cornerstone of the Bunker Hill monument. Eighteen years later, when that monument was finished, he delivered another. Many of Mr. Webster’s admirers think that these two orations are his masterpieces.

On July 4th, 1826, the United States had been independent just fifty years. On that day there passed away two of the greatest men of the country–John Adams and Thomas Jefferson.

Both were ex-presidents, and both had been leaders in the councils of the nation. It was in memory of these two patriots that Daniel Webster was called to deliver an oration in Faneuil Hall, Boston.

No other funeral oration has ever been delivered in any age or country that was equal to this in eloquence. Like all his other discourses, it was full of patriotic feeling.

“This lovely land,” he said, “this glorious liberty, these benign institutions, the dear purchase of our fathers, are ours; ours to enjoy, ours to preserve, ours to transmit. Generations past and generations to come hold us responsible for this sacred trust.

“Our fathers, from behind, admonish us with their anxious, paternal voices; posterity calls out to us from the bosom of the future; the world turns hither its solicitous eyes; all, all conjure us to act wisely and faithfully in the relation which we sustain.”

Most of his other great speeches were delivered in Congress, and are, therefore, political in tone and subject.

Great as Daniel Webster was in politics and in law, it is as an orator and patriot that his name will be longest remembered.

XIII. MR. WEBSTER IN THE SENATE.

When Daniel Webster was forty years old, the people of Boston elected him to represent them in Congress. They were so well pleased with all that he did while there, that they re-elected him twice.

In June, 1827, the legislature of Massachusetts chose him to be United States senator for a term of six years. He was at that time the most famous man in Massachusetts, and his name was known and honored in every state of the Union.

After that he was re-elected to the same place again and again; and for more than twenty years he continued to be the distinguished senator from Massachusetts.