Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 3.djvu/40

14 December, 1851. He entered as the successor of Daniel Webster, who had been appointed Secretary of State. On that same 1st of December Henry Clay spoke his last word in the Senate, and then left the chamber, never to return.

A striking and most significant coincidence: Henry Clay disappeared from public life; Daniel Webster left the Senate, drawing near his end; Charles Sumner stepped upon the scene. The close of one and the setting in of another epoch in the history of the American Republic were portrayed in the exit and entry of these men.

Clay and Webster had appeared in the councils of the Nation in the early part of this century. The Republic was then still in its childhood, in almost every respect still an untested experiment, an unsolved problem. Slowly and painfully had it struggled through the first conflicts of Constitutional theories, and acquired only an uncertain degree of National consistency. There were the somewhat unruly democracies of the States, with their fresh revolutionary reminiscences, their instincts of entirely independent sovereignty, and their now and then seemingly divergent interests; and the task of binding them firmly together in the bonds of common aspirations, of National spirit and the authority of National law, had, indeed, fairly progressed, but was far from being entirely accomplished. The United States, not yet compacted by the means of rapid locomotion which to-day make every inhabitant of the land a neighbor of the National capital, were then still a straggling confederacy; and the members of that confederacy had, since the triumphant issue of the Revolution, more common memories of severe trials, sufferings, embarrassments, dangers, and anxieties together, than of cheering successes and of assured prosperity and well-being.

The great powers of the old world, fiercely contending