nce, to bring
things to pass. We shall observe it in the oratory of Clay and Webster,
as they pleaded for compromise; in the editorials of Garrison, a foe to
compromise and like Calhoun an advocate, if necessary, of disunion;
in the epochmaking novel of Harriet Beecher Stowe; in the speeches of
Wendell Phillips, in verse white-hot with political passion, and sermons
blazing with the fury of attack and defense of principles dear to the
human heart. We must glance, at least, at the lyrics produced by the war
itself, and finally, we shall observe how Abraham Lincoln, the inheritor
of the ideas of Jefferson, Clay, and Webster, perceives and maintains,
in the noblest tones of our civic speech, the sole conditions of our
continuance as a nation.

Let us begin with oratory, an American habit, and, as many besides
Dickens have thought, an American defect. We cannot argue that question
adequately here. It is sufficient to say that in the pioneer stages of
our existence oratory was necessary as a stimulus to communal thought
and feeling. The speeches of Patrick Henry and Samuel Adams were as
essential to our winning independence as the sessions of statesmen and
the armed conflicts in the field. And in that new West which came so
swiftly and dramatically into existence at the close of the Revolution,
the orator came to be regarded as the normal type of intellectual
leadership. The stump grew more potent than schoolhouse and church and
bench.

The very pattern, and, if one likes, the tragic victim of this
glorification of oratory was Henry Clay, "Harry of the West," the
glamour of whose name and the wonderful tones of whose voice became for
a while a part of the political system of the United States. Union and
Liberty were the master-passions of Clay's life, but the greater
of these was Union. The half-educated young immigrant from Virginia
hazarded his career at the outset by championing Anti-Slavery in the
Kentucky Constitutional Convention; the last notable act of his life was
his successful management, at the age of seventy-three, of the futile
Compromise of 1850. All his life long he fought for national issues; for
the War of 1812, for a protective tariff and an "American system," for
the Missouri Compromise of 1820 as a measure for national safety; and
he had plead generously for the young South American republics and for
struggling Greece. He had become the perpetual candidate of his party
for the Presidency, and had gone