statesmanship affords a subject of curious and profitable contemplation.
The action of different systems of government, encouraging or depressing
intellectual effort, the birth of occasions which elicit the powers of
great minds, and the peculiar characteristics of the manner of thinking
and speaking in different countries, are observable in considering this
topic. A pardonable curiosity has led the writer frequently to visit the
United States Senate Chamber, and to place mentally the intellectual
giants of that body in contrast with their predecessors on the same
scene, and with the eminent orators and statesmen of other countries and
other ages; and the result of such comparisons has always been to awaken
national pride, and to convince that the polity bequeathed us by our
fathers, no less than the distinctive genius of the race, have
practically demonstrated that a free system is the most prolific in the
production of animated oratory and vigorous statesmanship. Undoubtedly,
the golden age of American eloquence must be fixed in the time of
General Jackson, when Webster, Clay, Calhoun, Rives, Woodbury, and Hayne
sat in the Upper House; and whatever may be our wonder, when we
contemplate the brilliant orations of the British statesmen who shone
toward the close of the last century, if we turn from Burke to Webster,
from Pitt to Calhoun, from Fox to Clay, and from Sheridan to Randolph
and to Rives, Americans can not be disappointed by the comparison. Since
the death of the last of that illustrious trio, whose equality of powers
made it futile to award by unanimity the superiority to either, and yet
whose greatness of intellect placed them by common assent far above all
others, the eloquence of the Senate has been less brilliant and less
interesting. And yet it has not fallen below a standard of eloquence
equal, if not superior, to that of any other nation. Unlike the English
and the French, who have to go back more than half a century to deplore
their greatest Senators and Ministers, the grave closed over the
greatest American intellects within the memory of the present