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been long separated from their text. The subject which he selected was the "State of our Literature." After adverting to the fact that neither our own country nor the age was distinguished by uncommon literary zeal, he entered upon a discussion of the causes which then impeded the cultivation of letters and science in America. The following passage, in which he answered what was then a domestic apology for the prevailing "apathy in the pursuit of literary and scientific objects," may be quoted; for it reminds us of the great thoughts that were afterward so imposingly developed in his Plymouth discourse:

"It has indeed been said that America is yet too young to imbibe an ardor for letters; that she can hardly expect even works of mediocrity, for years yet to come; that seven centuries from the foundation of Rome were scarcely sufficient to produce Horace and Virgil, Hortensius and Cicero; that when as many years have rolled by, from the landing of our fathers, as from Romulus to Augustus, we may then expect great poets, orators, and historians. No reasons from analogy can apply among nations so entirely dissimilar. Rome set out in the career of national existence completely barbarous. She got up out of her cradle an infant savage, with all the wolf in her blood. She was profoundly ignorant of first elements. She began at her alphabet. America, on the contrary, commenced her existence at a time when the sources of knowledge were unfolded, and the human mind was bounding forward in the path of improvement. Her first colonists were scholars. Raleigh, Smith, Penn, Robinson, are not names found in the first page of Roman history. No nation can trace so certain and so honorable an ancestry as America. It runs not back to clans of ravishers and robbers, nor to the lair of the foster-mother of Romulus. Nor is it enveloped in feudal ignorance or Druidical mystery. It is the plantation of enlightened men, from the bestinformed nations of Europe, in a new country, who were anxious to strew the seeds of knowledge at the birth and beginning of their republic.”

This extract is sufficient to enable the reader to mark the period when Mr. Webster had acquired the style for which he was distinguished through life. The short, pregnant sentences, the choice and expressive words, the rejection of superfluous phrases, are here as conspicuous as they are in any thing that he ever wrote.1

1 In some rough notes written by Mr. Webster in 1831, for the use of a friend, 1 and the following, relating to this oration: "As far as I remember, I had 8

hardly put pen to paper when I left
Boscawen [Portsmouth] to deliver it.
things were conned over and delivered
Much was written on the road, and many

The period which intervened between 1809 and 1812 was, as I have already said, exclusively devoted by Mr. Webster to the practice of his profession. But the year 1812 brought with it a great change in the situation of the country, and a community like that of Portsmouth could not leave such a man as Mr. Webster in the occupations and enjoyments of private life. In June of that year, on the recommendation of Mr. Madison, then President of the United States, Congress had declared war against England-a war which the supporters of the Administration had long regarded as inevitable and necessary, but which their opponents had as steadily sought to avert. The Embargo, which commenced in 1807 under Mr. Jefferson, had produced no effect on the course of England and France toward the neutral commerce of the United States. It was relaxed in 1809, in respect to our trade with other countries; but against England and France a system of the strictest nonintercourse was substituted for it, by an act passed on the 1st of March, 1809, which was to continue until the end of the next session of Congress. It was announced, in this law, that in case either England or France should so revoke or modify her edicts as that they should cease to violate the neutral commerce of the United States, the President was authorized to reopen the trade with the nation so doing, by proclamation.

The position thus taken involved us in such a way in the dealings of the two belligerents with each other, in respect to their injurious edicts, that France was enabled to exercise over our course, by her menaces, her flattery, and her duplicity, a far greater influence than should ever have been permitted to her. As soon as Napoleon heard of our Non-intercourse Act of March 1, 1809, he immediately seized and sequestered all the American vessels then in France, with their cargoes, by way, as he said, of reprisal. Congress then modified the authority given to the President, by a new act passed on the 1st of May, 1810, which provided that, in case either Great Britain or France should, before the 3d of March, 1811, so

which were never written at all. I have turned down two leaves and marked short passages. I find, on one of them, a good round abuse of the press, which it may be prudent to omit." I do not

find any distinct allusion to the press, but I presume Mr. Webster referred to a passage in which he introduced a vigorous denunciation of the corrupting effect of party politics.

revoke or modify her edicts as that they would cease to violate the neutral commerce of the United States, the President might declare the fact by proclamation; and that, if the other nation did not do the same thing within three months thereafter, the President might put the Non-intercourse Act in force against her. A copy of this law was immediately forwarded to the American minister in Paris, and he was instructed to say to the French Government that they now had an opportunity, by repealing their edicts as to the United States, to see the latter put their Non-intercourse Act in force against England, in order to compel her to abandon her Orders in Council. At the same time, our minister was directed to combine, with his application for a repeal of the French Decrees, a demand for restitution of the American property that had been sequestered in France.

Napoleon adroitly seized upon this overture. On the 5th of August, 1810, his foreign secretary wrote to our minister, that as Congress had now retraced their steps, and had opened the trade of France to American ports, and engaged to oppose. whichever of the belligerent powers that should refuse to acknowledge the rights of neutrals, he was authorized to declare the Decrees of Berlin and Milan revoked, and that after the 1st of the ensuing November they would cease to have effect; it being understood, he added, that, in consequence of this declaration, the English should revoke their Orders in Council and renounce the new principles of blockade which they had wished to establish, or that the United States, conformably to their Non-intercourse Act, should cause their rights to be respected by the English. He further expressed the satisfaction of the Emperor in making known this determination, and added that His Majesty loved the Americans, and that their prosperity and their commerce were within the scope of his policy. But no copy of any repealing decree was furnished to the American minister, and he consequently could not enable his colleague in London to exhibit to the British Government any thing but the conditional and equivocal French note of August 5, 1810. As late as the 7th of September, all that could be further drawn from the French secretary was, that the Berlin and Milan Decrees would not be applied to American vessels, if they could be considered as American, but that they would

be treated as hostile if they had submitted to be visited by British cruisers under the Orders in Council.

But the British Government did not consider that this proceeding could be made the ground for exacting from them a repeal of their Orders in Council, in compliance with a promise which they had previously given to repeal them, when satisfied of the revocation of the French Decrees. They construed the French declaration in one of the ways of which it was certainly susceptible, namely, as a conditional revocation; the condition being, as they viewed it, that, before the French Decrees should cease to operate, Great Britain must have repealed her Orders in Council, and also must have renounced those principles of blockade which the French alleged to be new. They said that the United States could not be warranted in putting their Non-intercourse Act in force against England, and not against France, under such a condition as France had now added to the American claim.

At home, the President, relying on the French declaration, on the 2d of November, 1810, issued his proclamation, announcing that the French Decrees had been so revoked as to cease to violate the neutral commerce of the United States, and declaring our trade open with France and her dependencies. On the same day the collectors of the customs throughout the Union were instructed to put the Non-intercourse Act in force, after the 2d of the ensuing February, against British vessels, and all the productions of Great Britain and her dependencies, if the revocation of the English Orders in Council had not in the mean time been announced. When informed of this step, Napoleon did nothing more than to direct his prize courts to suspend the further execution of the Berlin and Milan Decrees, in the cases of American vessels, until the 2d of February, but to hold the American prizes in a state of sequestration until that day. His cruisers were not directed to cease making captures of American property sailing in contravention of his decrees. The Emperor reserved to himself to determine, on the 2d of February, "with regard to the definitive measures to be taken for distinguishing and favoring the American navigation."

While these things were taking place in France and in

America, our minister in London, Mr. Pinckney, was engaged in claiming from the English ministry a repeal of their Orders in Council, upon the ground of the French declaration of August 5, 1810, and was receiving in substance the answer which has already been recapitulated. This discussion lasted from the middle of August, 1810, until the last of February, 1811, when Mr. Pinckney, convinced that nothing could be done, asked for an audience of leave from the Prince Regent, which was granted on the 1st of March, and he prepared to return home. But, before his departure, the appointment of Mr. Foster as minister plenipotentiary to the United States was announced to him, with the intimation, however, that Mr. Foster, while instructed to adjust, if possible, all matters of difference with the United States, would not be authorized to relinquish any of the principles on which the British Government held it to be impossible for them to repeal their Orders in Council under the conditions which they understood to have been dictated by France. They desired, they said, to relinquish those orders whenever it could be done without involving the sacrifice of their essential maritime rights and interests.

Meanwhile, in the absence of satisfactory proof that the French Decrees had been repealed, more than twenty-five American vessels, with their cargoes, were condemned by the English Admiralty Court, in May and June of that year (1811), for violation of the Orders in Council. Other occurrences tended to increase the popular irritation against England on this side of the Atlantic. In May, a conflict took place between our frigate the President and the British cruiser the Little Belt. This affair was the counterpart of that of the Chesapeake and the Leopard; but, in this instance, the superiority of force was on our side, and the combat grew out of an attempt by our frigate to ascertain the nationality of the Little Belt. When, therefore, Mr. Foster arrived in Washington, in July, 1811, he had to deal with the cases of the Chesapeake and the Little Belt, the grievances arising from the impressment of seamen out of our vessels, the demand of our Government for a repeal of the Orders in Council, and other topics of serious difference. The great obstacles to any adjustment, however, were found in the right of search insisted on by Great