It promoted the very struggle which it proposed to allay, for it admitted the existence of only one side to the question.

The consciences of men cannot be coerced; and when Mr.Webster undertook to do it he dashed himself against the rocks.
People did not stop to distinguish between a legal argument and a defence of the merits of catching runaway slaves.

To refer to the original law of 1793 was idle.

Public opinion had changed in half a century; and what had seemed reasonable at the close of the eighteenth century was monstrous in the middle of the nineteenth.
All this Mr.Webster declined to recognize.

He upheld without diminution or modification the constitutional duty of sending escaping slaves back to bondage; and from the legal soundness of this position there is no escape.
The trouble was that he had no word to say against the cruelty and barbarity of the system.