defend the Union and the Constitution in the forum. That I cannot do,
but I am ready to defend them in the field." Like other national men, he
refused to listen to the "sixty-day" prattle by which others were
deceived. He saw that by no "summer excursion to Moscow" could the
Southern Confederacy be suppressed; that immense forces would be
marshalled in aid of that Confederacy; and that the war for the Union,
like the war for Independence, would be won only by 'suffering, and
struggle, and death.

Ten years earlier, it seemed to Rufus Choate as if the hoarded-up
resentments and revenges of a thousand years were about to unsheath the
sword for a conflict, "in which the blood should flow, as in the
Apocalyptic vision, to the bridles of the horses; in which a whole age
of men should pass away; in which the great bell of time should sound
out another hour; in which society itself should be tried by fire and
steel, whether it were of Nature and of Nature's God, or not."

Such a conflict was indeed impending, and Fletcher Webster appreciated
its extreme gravity, when, from the balcony of the Old State House, on
that Sunday morning, he made his stirring appeal: "Let us show the world
that the patriotism of '61 is not less than that of '76; that the noble
impulses of those patriot hearts have descended to us."

On the eighteenth of July, 1861, Edward Everett presented to Colonel
Webster a splendid regimental flag, the gift of the ladies of Boston to
the Twelfth Regiment.[1] It need not be said that the presentation
speech of Mr. Everett, and the reception speech of Colonel Webster, were
of the first order. But not even the words of a Webster or an Everett
could adequately express the profound emotion of the vast concourse of
people then assembled. For it was one of those occasions when, as the