on this very spot, with her eye ever watchful, and her eagle wing ever
wide outspread." There is something astonishing in the dignity given in
the last clause of this sentence to the American eagle,--a bird so
degraded by the rhodomontade of fifth-rate declaimers, that it seemed
impossible that the highest genius and patriotism could restore it to
its primacy among the inhabitants of the air, and its just eminence as a
symbol of American liberty. It is also to be noted, that Webster here
alludes to "the bird of freedom" only as it appears on the American
silver dollar that passes daily from hand to hand, where the watchful
eye and the outspread wing are so inartistically represented that the
critic is puzzled to account for the grandeur of the image which the
orator contrived to evolve from the barbaric picture on the ugliest and
clumsiest of civilized coins.

The compactness of Webster's statements occasionally reminds us of the
epigrammatic point which characterizes so many of the statements of
Burke. Thus, in presenting a memorial to Congress, signed by many
prominent men of business, against President Jackson's system of
finance, he saw at once that the Democrats would denounce it as another
manifesto of the "moneyed aristocracy." Accordingly Webster introduced
the paper to the attention of the Senate, with the preliminary remark:
"The memorialists are not unaware, that, if rights are attacked,
attempts will be made to render odious those whose rights are violated.
Power always seeks such subjects on which to try its experiments." It is
difficult to resist the impression that Webster must have been indebted
to Burke for this maxim. Again, we are deluded into the belief that we
must be reading Burke, when Webster refers to the _minimum_ principle as
the right one to be followed in imposing duties on certain manufactures.
"It lays the impost," he says, "exactly where it will do good, and
leaves the rest free. It is an intelligent, discerning, discriminating