New friends came to him, but they did not supply the place of the old friends, who for a lifetime had stood by him with unswerving principle and with ever-increasing pride.
Excitement and passion do not, however, always issue decrees and pronounce judgments of absolute right.

In the zeal of that hour, Northern anti-slavery opinion failed to appreciate the influence which wrought so powerfully on the mind of Mr.Webster.

He belonged with those who could remember the first President, who personally knew much of the hardships and sorrows of the Revolutionary period, who were born to poverty and reared in privation.

To these, the formation of the Federal Government had come as a gift from Heaven, and they had heard from the lips of the living Washington in his farewell words, that "the Union is the edifice of our real independence, the support of our tranquillity at home, our peace abroad, our prosperity, our safety, and of the very liberty which we so highly prize, that for this Union we should cherish a cordial, habitual, immovable attachment, and should discountenance whatever may suggest even a suspicion that it can in any event be abandoned." Mr.Webster had in his own lifetime seen the thirteen colonies grow into thirty powerful States.

He had seen three millions of people, enfeebled and impoverished by a long struggle, increased eightfold in number, surrounded by all the comforts, charms, and securities of life.