They said to
slavery: "Back! no entrance here! We pledge ourselves against you."
And then there came up a little printer-boy, who whipped them into
the traces, and made them talk, like Hotspur's starling, nothing
BUT slavery. He scattered all these gigantic shadows,--tariff, bank,
constitutional questions, financial questions; and slavery, like
the colossal head in Walpole's romance, came up and filled the whole
political horizon! Yet you must remember he is not a statesman! he is
a "fanatic." He has no discipline,--Mr. "Ion" says so; he does not
understand the "discipline that is essential to victory"! This man did
not understand his own time, he did not know what the future was to
be,--he was not able to shape it--he had no "prudence,"--he had no
"foresight"! Daniel Webster says, "I have never introduced this subject,
and never will,"--and dies broken-hearted because he had not been
able to talk enough about it! Benton says, "I will never speak of
slavery,"--and lives to break with his party on this issue! Clay says it
is "moral treason" to introduce the subject into Congress--and lives to
see Congress turned into an antislavery debating society, to suit the
purpose of one "too powerful individual.
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