ner and
half the Washington politician. In many ways he was very Western. He had
a Westerner's pugnacity, and at the same time a Westerner's geniality
and capacity for comradeship with men. He had to the last a Westerner's
private tastes--especially a taste for gambling--and a Westerner's
readiness to fight duels. Above all, from the time that he entered
Congress as the fiercest of the "war hawks" who clamoured for vengeance
on England, to the time when, an old and broken man, he expended the
last of his enormous physical energy in an attempt to bridge the
widening gulf between North and South, he showed through many grievous
faults and errors that intense national feeling and that passion for the
Union which were growing so vigorously in the fertile soil beyond the
Alleghanies. But he was a Western shoot early engrafted on the political
society of Washington--the most political of all cities, for it is a
political capital and nothing else. He entered Congress young and found
there exactly the atmosphere that suited his tastes and temperament. He
was as much the perfect parliamentarian as Gladstone. For how much his
tact and instinct for the tone of the political assembly in which he
moved counted may be guessed from this fact: that while there is no
speech of his that has come down to us that one could place for a
moment beside some of extant contemporary speeches of Webster and
Calhoun, yet it is unquestionable that he was considered fully a match
for either Webster or Calhoun in debate, and in fact attained an
ascendancy over Congress which neither of those great orators ever
possessed. At the management of the minds of men with whom he was
actually in contact he was unrivalled. No man was so skilful in
harmonizing apparently irreconcilable differences and choosing the exact
line of policy which opposing factions could agree to support. Three
times he rode what seemed the most devastating political storms, and
three times he imposed a peace. But with the strength of a great
parliamentarian he had much of the weakness that goes with it. He
thought too much as a professional; and in his own skilled work of
matching measures, arranging parties and moving politicians about like
pawns, he came more and more to forget the silent drive of the popular
will. All this, however, belongs to a later stage of Clay's development.
At the moment, we have to deal with him as the ablest of those who were
bent upon compelling the Preside