the genuine product of our republican institutions. No poor boy who reads his life need despair of becoming eminent, for he can hardly have more obstacles to overcome than the farmers' boy, who grew up on the sterile soil of New Hampshire, and fought his way upward with unfailing courage and pluck. Not once in a century is such a man born into the world-a man so amply endowed by his Creator-but he did not rely upon his natural talents, but was a firm believer in hard work. With all his marvelous ability he would not otherwise have left behind him such a name and fame.

CHAPTER XXXVIII.

CENTENNIAL TRIBUTES.

On the 18th of January, 1882, the hundredth birthday of Daniel Webster, the Marshfield Club assembled at the Parker House, in Boston, to take suitable notice of the anniversary. Though thirty years had elapsed since his death there was one at least present, Hon. Robert C. Winthrop, who had been intimately associated with him in public life, having been his successor in the Senate, and a warm personal friend. Most notable among the addresses was that of Gov. Long, of Massachusetts, which I shall venture to insert here, as containing in brief compass a fitting estimate of the great statesman whom the company had assembled to honor.

GOVERNOR LONG'S ADDRESS.

"It is but a poor tribute that even the most eloquent voice, least of all mine, can pay for Massachusetts to the memory of her greatest statesman, her mightiest intellect and her most powerful orator. Among her sons he towers like the lonely

and massive shaft on Bunker Hill, upon the base and the crest of which his name is emblazoned clearer than if chiseled deep in its granite cubes.. For years he was her synonym. Among the States he sustained her at that proud height which Winthrop and Sam Adams gave her in the colonial and provincial days. With what matchless grandeur he defended her! With what overwhelming power he impressed her convictions upon the national life! God seems to appoint men to special work, and, that done, the very effort of its achievement exhausts them, and they rise not again to the summit of their meridian. So it was with Webster. He knows little even of written constitutions and frames of government who does not know that they exist almost less in the letter than in the interpretation and construction of the letter. In this light it is not too much to say that the Constitution of the United States, as it existed when it carried our country through the greatest peril that ever tested it, was the crystallization of the mind of Webster as well as of its original framers. It came from them and was only accepted by some of our own as a compact of States, sovereign in all but certain enumerated powers delegated to a central government. He made it the crucible of a welded Union-the charter of one great country, the

United States of America. He made the States a nation and enfolded them in its single banner. It was the overwhelming logic of his discussion, the household familiarity of his simple but irresistible statement, that gave us munition to fight the war for the preservation of the Union and the abolition of slavery. It was his eloquence, clear as crystal and precipitating itself in the school-books and literature of a people, which had trained up the generation of twenty years ago to regard this nation as one, to love its flag with a patriotism that knew no faction or section, to be loyal to the whole country, and to find in its Constitution power to suppress any hand or combination raised against it. The great Rebellion of - 1861 went down hardly more before the cannon of Grant and Farragut than the thunder of Webster's reply to Hayne. He knew not the extent of his own achievement. His greatest failure was that he rose not to the height and actual stroke of his own resistless argument, and that he lacked the sublime inspiration, the disentanglement and the courage to let the giant he had created go upon his errand, first of force, and then, through that, of surer peace. He had put the work and genius of more than an ordinary lifetime of service into the arching and knitting of the Union, and this he could not bear to put

to the final test; his great heart was sincere in the prayer that his eyes might not behold the earthquake that would shake it to those foundations which, though he knew it not, he had made so strong that a succeeding generation saw them stand the shock as the oak withstands the storm. Men are not gods, and it needed in him that he should rise to a moral sublimity and daring as lofty as the intellectual heights above which he soared with unequaled strength. So had he been godlike.

"A great man touches the heart of the people as well as their intelligence. They not only admire, they also love him. It sometimes seems as if they sought in him some weakness of our common human nature, that they may chide him for it, forgive it, and so endear him to themselves the more. Massachusetts had her friction with the younger Adams, only to lay him away with profounder honor, and to remember him devotedly as the defender of the right of petition and 'the old man eloquent.' She forgave the overweening conceit of Sumner, she revoked her unjust censure of him, and now points her youth to him in his high niche as the unsullied patriot, without fear and without reproach, who stood and spoke for equal rights, and whose last great service was to demand and enforce his country's just