ies of Virginia and Kentucky, and there
was a renewal of the old Jeffersonian efforts to limit the authority of the
Supreme Court. Instead of being able to improve, he was obliged to defend
the court, and this he did successfully, defeating all attempts to curtail
its power by alterations of the act of 1789. These duties and that of
investigating the charges brought by Ninian Edwards against Mr. Crawford,
the Secretary of the Treasury, made the session an unusually laborious one,
and detained Mr. Webster in Washington until midsummer.

The short session of the next winter was of course marked by the
excitement attendant upon the settlement of the presidential election which
resulted in the choice of Mr. John Quincy Adams by the House of
Representatives. The intense agitation in political circles did not,
however, prevent Mr. Webster from delivering one very important speech, nor
from carrying through successfully one of the most important and
practically useful measures of his legislative career. The speech was
delivered in the debate on the bill for continuing the national Cumberland
road. Mr. Webster had already, many years before, defined his position on
the constitutional question involved in internal improvements. He now, in
response to Mr. McDuffie of South Carolina, who denounced the measure as
partial and sectional, not merely defended the principle of internal
improvements, but declared that it was a policy to be pursued only with the
purest national feeling. It was not the business of Congress, he said, to
legislate for this State or that, or to balance local interests, and
because they helped one region to help another, but to act for the benefit
of all the States united, and in making improvements to be guided only by
their necessity. He showed that these roads would open up the West to
settlement, and incidentally defended the policy of selling the public
lands at a low price as an encouragement to emigration, telling his
Southern friends very plainly that they could not expect to coerce the
course of population in favor of their own section. The whole speech was
conceived in the broadest and wisest spirit, and marks another step in the
development of Mr. Webster as a national statesman. It increased his
reputation, and brought to him a great accession of popularity in the West.

The measure which he carried through was the famous "Crimes Act," perhaps
the best monument that there is of his legislative and c