ument
into one luminous phrase, which often seemed to prove his case by
merely stating it. Thus, in the Dartmouth College case, he made a rare
display of learning (furnished him by associate counsel, he tells us);
but his argument is concentrated in two of his simplest sentences:--1.
The endowment of a college is private property; 2. The charter of a
college is that which constitutes its endowment private property. The
Supreme Court accepted these two propositions, and thus secured to
every college in the country its right to its endowment. This seems
too simple for argument, but it cost a prodigious and powerfully
contested lawsuit to reduce the question to this simplicity; and it
was Webster's large, calm, and discriminating glance which detected
these two fundamental truths in the mountain mass of testimony,
argument, and judicial decision. In arguing the great steamboat case,
too, he displayed the same qualities of mind. New York having granted
to Livingston and Fulton the exclusive right to navigate her waters by
steamboats, certain citizens of New Jersey objected, and, after a
fierce struggle upon the waters themselves, transferred the contest to
the Supreme Court. Mr. Webster said: "The commerce of the United
States, under the Constitution of 1787, is a unit," and "what we call
the waters of the State of New York are, for the purposes of
navigation and commerce, the waters of the United States"; therefore
no State can grant exclusive privileges. The Supreme Court affirmed
this to be the true doctrine, and thenceforth Captain Cornelius
Vanderbilt ran his steamboat without feeling it necessary, on
approaching New York, to station a lady at the helm and to hide
himself in the hold. Along with this concentrating power, Mr. Webster
possessed, as every school-boy knows, a fine talent for amplification
and narrative. His narration of the murder of Captain White was almost
enough of itself to hang a man.

But it was not his substantial services to his country which drew upon
him the eyes of all New England, and made him dear to every son of the
Pilgrims. In 1820, the Pilgrim Society of Plymouth celebrated the
anniversary of the landing of their forefathers in America. At the
dinner of the Society, that day, every man found beside his plate five
kernels of corn, to remind him of the time when that was the daily
allowance of the settlers, and it devolved upon Daniel Webster to show
how worthy they were of better fare. His