Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 3.djvu/41

Rh among themselves for the mastery, trampled, without remorse, upon the neutral rights of the young and feeble Republic. A war was impending with one of them, bringing on disastrous reverses and spreading alarm and discontent over the land. A dark cloud of financial difficulty hung over the Nation. And the danger from abroad and embarrassments at home were heightened by a restless party spirit, which former disagreements had left behind them, and which every newly-arising question seemed to embitter. The outlook was dark and uncertain. It was under such circumstances that Henry Clay first, and Daniel Webster shortly after him, stepped upon the scene, and at once took their station in the foremost rank of public men.

The problems to be solved by the statesmen of that period were of an eminently practical nature. They had to establish the position of the young Republic among the powers of the earth; to make her rights as a neutral respected; to secure the safety of her maritime interests. They had to provide for National defense. They had to set the interior household of the Republic in working order.

They had to find remedies for a burdensome public debt and a disordered currency. They had to invent and originate policies, to bring to light the resources of the land, sleeping unknown in the virgin soil; to open and make accessible to the husbandman the wild acres yet untouched; to protect the frontier settler against the inroads of the savage; to call into full activity the agricultural, commercial and industrial energies of the people; to develop and extend the prosperity of the Nation so as to make even the discontented cease to doubt that the National Union was, and should be maintained as, a blessing to all.

Thus we find the statesmanship of those times busily