recollection. But now, the whole nation feels, as with one heart, that since it must sooner or later have been bereaved of its revered fathers, it could not have wished that any other day had been the day of their decease. Our anniversary festival was before triumphant; it is now triumphant and sacred. It before called out the young and ardent, to join in the public rejoicings; it now also speaks in a touching voice, to the retired, to the gray-headed, to the mild and peaceful spirits, to the whole family of sober freemen. It is henceforth, what the dying Adams pronounced it, a great and a good day." It is full of greatness and full of goodness. It is absolute and complete. The death of the men who declared our independence, their death on the day of the jubilee,—was all that was wanting to the Fourth of July. To die on that day, and to die together, was all that was wanting to Jefferson and Adams. CLXV.-EXECUTIVE POWER. DANIEL WEBSTER. MR. PRESIDENT, the contest, for ages, has been to rescue liberty from the grasp of executive power. Whoever has engaged in her sacred cause, from the days of the downfall of those great aristocracies, which had stood between the king and the people, to the time of our own independence, has struggled for the accomplishment of that single object. On the long list of the champions of human freedom, there is not one name dimmed by the reproach of advocating the extension of executive authority: on the contrary, the uniform and steady purpose of all such champions has been to limit and restrain it. To this end the spirit of liberty, growing more and more enlightened, and more and more vigorous from age to age, has been battering for centuries, against the solid butments of the feudal system. To this end, all that could be gained from the imprudence, snatched from the weakness, or wrung from the necessities, of crowned heads, has been carefully gathered up, secured and hoarded, as the rich treasures, the very jewels of liberty. To this end, popular and representative right has kept up its warfare against prerogative, with various success; sometimes writing the history of a whole age in blood; sometimes witnessing the martyrdom of Sidneys and Russells, often baffled and re GREATNESS OF NAPOLEON. 217 pulsed, but still gaining on the whole, and holding what is gained with a grasp which nothing but the complete extinction of its own being could compel it to relinquish. At length, the great conquest over executive power, in the leading western states of Europe, has been accomplished. The feudal system, like other stupendous fabrics of past ages, is known only by the rubbish which it has left behind it. Crowned heads have been compelled to submit to the restraints of law, and the PEOPLE, with that intelligence and that spirit which makes the voice resistless, have been able to say to prerogative, "Thus far shalt thou come, and no farther." I need hardly say, sir, that, into the full enjoyment of all which Europe has reached only through such slow and painful steps, we sprang at once, by the declaration of independence, and by the establishment of free representative governments; governments borrowing more or less from the models of other free states, but strengthened, secured, improved in their symmetry, and deepened in their founda tion, by those great men of our own country, whose names will be as familiar to future times as if they were written on the arch of the sky. CLXVI.-GREATNESS OF NAPOLEON. W. E. CHANNING By the greatness of action, we mean the sublime power of conceiving bold and extensive plans; of constructing and bringing to bear on a mighty object a complicated machinery of means, energies, and arrangements, and of accomplishing great outward effects. To this head belongs the greatness of Bonaparte, and that he possessed it, we need not prove, and none will be hardy enough to deny. A man, who raised himself from obscurity to a throne, who changed the face of the world, who made himself felt through powerful and civilized nations, who sent the terror of his name across seas and oceans, whose will was pronounced and feared as destiny, whose donatives were crowns, whose ante-chamber was thronged with submissive princes, who broke down the awful barrier of the Alps and made them a highway, and whose fame was spread beyond the boundaries of civilization to the steppes of the Cossack, and the deserts of the Arab; a man, who has left this record of himself in history, has taken out of our hands the question, whether he shall be called great. All must concede to him a sublime power of action, an energy equal to great effects. We are not disposed, however, to consider him as preëmi nent even in this order of greatness. War was his chief sphere. He gained his ascendency in Europe by the sword. But war is not the field for the highest active talent, and Napoleon, we suspect, was conscious of this truth. The glory of being the greatest general of his age would not have satisfied him. He would have scorned to take his place by the side of Marlborough or Turenne. It was as the founder of an empire, which threatened for a time to comprehend the world, and which demanded other talents besides that of war, that he challenged unrivalled fame. And here we question his claim. Here we cannot award him supremacy. The project of universal empire, however imposing, was not original. The Revolutionary governments of France had adopted it before; nor can we consider it as a sure indication of greatness, when we remember that the weak and vain mind of Louis the Fourteenth was large enough to cherish it. The question is; did Napoleon bring to this design the capacity of advancing it by bold and original conceptions, adapted to an age of civilization, and of singular intellectual and moral excitement? Did he discover new foundations of power? Did he frame new bonds of union for subjugated nations? Did he breathe a spirit which could supplant the old national attachments, or did he invent any substitutes for those vulgar instruments of force and corruption, which any and every usurper would have used? Never in the records of time did the world furnish such materials to work with, such means of modelling nations afresh, of building up a new power, of introducing a new era, as did Europe at the period of the French Revolution. Never was the human mind so capable of new impulses. And did Napoleon prove himself equal to the condition of the world? Do we detect one original conception in his means of universal empire? Did he seize on the enthusiasm of his age, that powerful principle, more efficient than arms or policy, and bend it to his purpose? He did nothing but follow the beaten track, but apply force and fraud in their very coarsest forms. With the sword in one hand and bribes in the other, he imagined himself absolute master of the human mind. |