great causes, and the contest derived from the eminent ability of the combatants all the interest of a personal struggle. The philosopher of the South, Mr. Calhoun, of whom it was said, to describe his influence, that as often as he took a pinch of snuff all South Carolina sneezed, put forward what was called the theory of nullification. He maintained that if an interested majority passed a law injurious to the settled interests of any State, that State had a right to interpose a veto. He was answered by Daniel Webster, the most eloquent of Americans, who asserted the absolute right of a legislature where all were fairly represented, to make laws for all. Then Calhoun insisted that if a State could not prevent the execution of a law which it deemed unconstitutional and injurious, it had the right to withdraw from the Union which it had conditionally joined.
The North shrunk from provoking this extremity, and made concessions which pacified the people of the South. But at the same time Webster laid down, in immortal speeches, that the Union is not a compact between the States, but a fundamental law no longer subject to their choice, and that each State is bound up with the rest by cords that cannot be legally severed. Thenceforward the opinion of Webster prevailed among American jurists. The right of redress was taken away from the South, and the Northern Republicans, taking advantage of this constitutional victory, entered upon those violent courses which ended in making the Union intolerable to those who were opposed to them. At that time the abolitionists commenced their crusade, which was directed as much against the Union, which they denounced as an "agreement with hell and a covenant with death," as against slavery itself. It became a settled doctrine among them that the North and the South could not continue together, and they made the public familiar with the idea of dissolution. "The Union," said Mr. Horace Greeley, the editor of The Tribune, "is not worth supporting in connection with the South." But the stronger part of the Republicans resolved to make themselves masters of the
