Scores of speakers hammered at every argument, yet only one speech eclipsed all the rest, and remains now, after one hundred and thirty years, a paragon.

There are historians who assert that this was the greatest speech delivered in Congress before Daniel Webster spoke there--an implication which might lead irreverent critics to whisper that too much reading may have dulled their discrimination.

But fortunately not only the text of the speech remains; we have also ample evidence of the effect it produced on its hearers.

Fisher Ames, a Representative from Massachusetts, uttered it.

He was a young lawyer, feeble in health, but burning, after the manner of some consumptives, with intellectual and moral fire which strangely belied his slender thread of physical life.