myself, no words can adequately tell the measureless debt I owe him, the moral and intellectual life he opened to me. I feel like the old Greek who, taught himself by Socrates, called his own scholars "the disciples of Socrates."

This is only another instance added to the roll of the Washingtons and the Hampdens, whose root is not ability, but character; that influence which, like the great Master's of Judea (humanly speaking), spreading through the centuries, testifies that the world suffers its grandest changes not by genius, but by the more potent control of character. His was an earnestness that would take no denial, that consumed opposition in the intensity of its convictions, that knew nothing but right. As friend after friend gathered slowly, one by one, to his side, in that very meeting of a dozen heroic men to form the New England Anti-slavery Society, it was his compelling hand, his resolute unwillingness to temper or qualify the utterance, that finally dedicated that first organized movement to the doctrine of immediate emancipation. He seems to have understood,this boy without experience, he seems to have understood by instinct that righteousness is the only thing which will finally compel submission; that one with God is always a majority. He seems to have known it at the very outset, taught of God, the herald and champion, God-endowed and God-sent to arouse a nation, that only by the most absolute assertion of the uttermost truth, without qualification or compromise, can a nation be waked to conscience or strengthened for duty. No man ever understood so thoroughly-not O'Connell nor Cobden-the nature and needs of that agitation which alone, in our day, reforms states. In the darkest hour he never doubted the omnipotence of conscience and the moral sentiment.

And then look at the unquailing courage with which he faced the successive obstacles that confronted him! Modest, believing at the outset that America could not be as corrupt as she seemed, he waits at the door of the churches, importunes leading clergymen, begs for a voice from the sanc

tuary, a consecrated protest from the pulpit. To his utter amazement, he learns by thus probing it that the Church will give him no help, but on the contrary surges into the movement in opposition. Serene, though astounded by the unexpected revelation, he simply turns his footsteps, and announces that "a Christianity which keeps peace with the oppressor is no Christianity," and goes on his way to supplant the religious element which the Church had allied with sin by a deeper religious faith. Yes, he sets himself to work this stripling with his sling confronting the angry giant in complete steel, this solitary evangelist to make Christians of twenty millions of people.

If anything strikes one more prominently than another in this career,-to your astonishment, young men, you may say, it is the plain, sober common sense, the robust English element which underlay Cromwell, which explains Hampden, which gives the color that distinguishes 1640 in England from 1790 in France. Plain, robust, well-balanced common sense. Nothing erratic; no enthusiasm which had lost its hold on firm earth; no mistake of method; no unmeasured confidence; no miscalculation of the enemy's strength. Whoever mistook, Garrison seldom mistook. Fewer mistakes in that long agitation of fifty years can be charged to his account than to any other American. Erratic as men supposed him, intemperate in utterance, mad in judgment, an enthusiast gone crazy; the moment you sat down at his side, patient in explanation, clear in statement, sound in judgment, studying carefully every step, calculating every assault, measuring the force to meet it, never in haste, always patient, waiting until the time ripened,-fit for a great leader. Cull, if you please, from the statesmen who obeyed him, whom he either whipped into submission or summoned into existence, cull from among them the man whose career, fairly examined, exhibits fewer miscalculations and fewer mistakes than this career which is just ended. When history seeks the sources of New England character, when men begin to open up and examine

the hidden springs and note the convulsions and the throes of American life within the last half-century, they will remember Parker, that Jupiter of the pulpit; they will remember the long unheeded but measureless influence that came to us from the seclusion of Concord; they will do justice to the masterly statesmanship which guided, during a part of his life, the efforts of Webster. But they will recognize that there was only one man north of Mason and Dixon's line who met squarely, with an absolute logic, the else impregnable position of John C. Calhoun; only one brave, far-sighted, keen, logical intellect, which discerned that there were only two moral points in the universe, right and wrong; that, when one was asserted, subterfuge and evasion would be sure to end in defeat.

Here lies the brain and the heart; here lies the statesmanlike intellect, logical as Jonathan Edwards, brave as Luther, which confronted the logic of South Carolina with an assertion direct and broad enough to make an issue and necessitate a conflict of two civilizations. Calhoun said, Slavery is right. Webster and Clay shrunk from him, and evaded his assertion. Garrison, alone at that time, met him face to face, proclaiming slavery a sin and daring all the inferences.

18. HENRY CLAY, OF KENTUCKY.-THE COMPROMISE OF 1850

(Delivered in the U. S. Senate, February 5 and 6, 1850.)

HENRY CLAY Won the title of "the Great Pacificator" by the three compromises which he originated in the endeavor to adjust the ever recurring disputes over Slavery.

(1) When Missouri presented itself for admission to the Union in 1821, with a constitution which prohibited free negroes from entering the State, it was Clay who quelled the newly arisen storm by drafting a resolution admitting the State on condition that its legislature, "by a solemn public act," bind itself not to pass the obnoxious constitutional provision into legislation.

(2) When South Carolina nullifiers and the Federal government as vested in Andrew Jackson were on the verge of armed collision in 1833, over the collection in South Carolina of protective tariff duties, Clay for a second time came forward and secured the passage of a compromise tariff (1833) which removed particular grounds of complaint and thus deferred the occasion for testing Nullification.

(3) For the last time, in 1850, Clay endeavored to save the Union, "upon a fair equality and just basis," by comprehending in a single series of measures "all questions of

HENRY CLAY. Born in Virginia, 1777; admitted to the bar and removed to Lexington, Ky., 1797; served for seven sessions in the Kentucky State legislature; in United States Senate, filling unexpired terms, 1806-07, and 1809-11; in House of Representatives, 1811-13 and 1815-25, serving as Speaker of the House for thirteen years; Peace Commissioner at Ghent, 1814; Secretary of State, 1825-29; in Senate, 1831-42 and 1849-52; unsuccessful candidate for Presidency, 1824, 1832, 1844; died, 1852.

controversy between [the States] arising out of the institution of slavery."

His propositions were introduced into the Senate on January 29, 1850, in a series of eight resolutions. The first provided for the admission of California without restriction as to slavery. The second declared, "That as slavery does not exist by law and is not likely to be introduced into any of the territory acquired from the Republic of Mexico, it is inexpedient for Congress to provide by law either for its introduction into or its exclusion from any part of the said territory." The third proposed a compromise settlement of the boundary between Texas and New Mexico, which was in dispute. By the fourth the United States was to provide for the payment of the public debt of Texas, contracted prior to annexation, for which the duties on foreign imports had been pledged while that State was independent, on condition that Texas formally relinquish her claim to any part of New Mexico. The fifth declared the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia to be "inexpedient," except with the consent of Maryland, of the people of the district, and with just compensation to owners of slaves. The sixth read: "That it is expedient to prohibit within the District the trade in slaves brought into it from States or places beyond the limits of the District, either to be sold therein as merchandise or to be transported to other markets without the District of Columbia." The seventh provided for a more effectual Fugitive Slave law. And the eighth declared that Congress has no power over the interState slave trade.

Clay was now seventy-three years old, and had laid aside his cherished ambition to become President. He was himself a Southerner and a slaveholder, but his attitude on slavery as an institution was thus declared in these debates: "I owe it to myself, I owe it to truth, I owe it to