Webster, Unabridged

Daniel Webster: A Conservative in a Democratic Age, by Robert V. Remini (Norton, 850 pp., $39.95)

RECENTLY, my seminar students were engaged in a vigorous discussion apropos of David Hume’s dictum that there is no necessary connection between private morality and public virtue or disinterested service to the common good. As long as they focused upon the present, the students tended to disagree with Hume, maintaining that the scumbags in Washington today are both personally immoral and heedless of the best interests of the country. But as they looked back to the Founding generation and its nineteenth-century successors, they were able to name many men whose private lives could not stand close scrutiny but who in their political capacity were dedicated to the public weal.

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Forrest McDonald

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Daniel Webster: A Conservative in a Democratic Age, by Robert V. Remini (Norton, 850 pp., $39.95)

RECENTLY, my seminar students were engaged in a vigorous discussion apropos of David Hume’s dictum that there is no necessary connection between private morality and public virtue or disinterested service to the common good. As long as they focused upon the present, the students tended to disagree with Hume, maintaining that the scumbags in Washington today are both personally immoral and heedless of the best interests of the country. But as they looked back to the Founding generation and its nineteenth-century successors, they were able to name many men whose private lives could not stand close scrutiny but who in their political capacity were dedicated to the public weal.