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 412 Webster and Hayne. [isso- lie with the sovereign associates whose agent he conceived the Federal government to be. Almost every northern man who heard such views set forth con- sidered them "new and dangerous," as Calhoun had foreseen. They seemed a little ridiculous, too, when put into practice. On November 24, 1832, South Carolina actually did declare the Tariff Acts of 1828 and 1832 null and void within her jurisdiction and in respect of her people, acting in sovereign convention, called in due form by her legislature. But no general convention of the States was called; Congress lowered the tariff duties, but would not abandon them or lower them upon the principle on which South Carolina had insisted; General Jackson was President and showed himself ready to carry out the laws of the United States, in South Carolina as elsewhere, by force of arms if necessary, like the hard-headed, practical soldier he was ; and South Carolina was obliged to yield without bringing her doctrine to a final test. She had gained enough, in the alteration of the tariff laws, she thought, to make her retreat something less than a surrender, and was fain to content herself with that. She laid her constitutional weapons aside until another time. Calhoun was unequally compounded of logician and statesman. In outlook, in sympathy, in insight, and in power among men a states- man, he was yet in all processes of systematic thought a subtle and uncompromising logician, and projected his argument without thought of time or limiting circumstance. There is in much of his writing the touch and tone of the schoolman, so refined is the reasoning, so abstract the processes of the thought. It was this thorough-going way of reasoning, from the careful premisses straight through to the utmost bounds of the conclusion, that made him seem to practical men a radical, almost a revolutionist. He made old doctrines seem " new and dangerous," because he pushed them beyond their old limits and gave them novel and disturbing applications. His doctrine of the ultimate sovereignty of the States was not new. It had once been commonplace to say that the Union was experimental, to speak of circumstances in which the contracting States might deem it best to withdraw. Webster had been prompt to challenge the doctrine of nullification and draw it out into the open in his debate with Senator Hayne ; and nobody who heard him then could doubt either his extraordinary power or the breadth and wisdom and impressiveness of his conceptions with regard to the national destiny and higher law of growth. But, though he was the better statesman, Hayne was the better historian. Webster's greatness was never more admirably exhibited than in that famous debate. His utterances on this occasion, moreover, sent a thrill through all the East and North which was unmistakeably a thrill of triumph. Men were glad because of what he had said. He had touched the national self-consciousness, awakened it, and pleased