Page:Life of Henry Clay (Schurz; v. 2).djvu/413

Rh While these things were going on, Clay was on his death-bed, growing weaker and weaker from day to day, the end coming fast. He still took interest enough in the affairs of the world to receive reports from the convention, and to express his satisfaction with what had been done.

In one respect he won the greatest triumph of his life at the close of it. Both political parties, his opponents as well as his friends, adopted his measures as the very foundation of their policy. The genius of statesmanship, it would seem, could hardly have achieved a triumph more complete.

This the eyes of the dying man were still permitted to see. But what they did not see was that this triumph would be speedily followed by the complete collapse of the policy he had advocated; that the peace effected by his “adjustment” would prove only a hollow truce, bearing in itself the germs of conflicts more terrible than his imagination had ever conceived; that the fugitive-slave law would be the greatest propagator of abolitionism which Machiavelian ingenuity could have devised; that his non-intervention with regard to slavery in New Mexico and Utah would soon serve as sponsor for Douglas's Kansas-Nebraska Bill, and thus bring slavery and free labor face to face, musket in hand, for a deadly conflict on the plains of the West; that a new school of statesmanship was rising up which, to save the Republic and its free institutions, would throw compromise to the winds; and a new generation of statesmen, who, with tremen-