dous effect, would lead into battle for liberty and Union that very “sentiment” which he, appreciating neither its character nor its force, had asked the people of the North to sacrifice for the sake of the Union. There they were already when he, tottering with age and bowed down by illness, cast his last look into the Senate Chamber, — in Daniel Webster's chair Charles Sumner, the champion of the anti-slavery conscience, joining hands with Seward, the philosophical anti-slavery politician; and Benjamin F. Wade, the very embodiment of defiant courage, sent by Ohio as the colleague of Salmon P. Chase.
Some portentous things Clay might have seen even before he closed his eyes: his party hopelessly divided in sentiment, and doomed to destruction in consequence of the very measures of peace with which he had sought to save the Union, vainly trying to prolong its existence by giving the South the platform, and the North the candidate; Southern Whigs, in spite of the platform, repudiating its action because of the candidate, and Northern Whigs uselessly striving to save the candidate by repudiating the platform. He might have foreseen how the people would spurn the whole nauseous bargain by giving the Democrats, who had at least the merit of greater straight-forwardness, an overwhelming majority of electoral votes; how the Whig party would suffer not only defeat, but annihilation, and how appropriate would be the epitaph suggested for it by a grim
