and indulged in more frequent bursts of beauty. Choate was more electric. Corwin better pleased the crowd was half clown and the other half genius. Sumner was more pretentiously the scholar, and excelled in copious illustration that exhausted the subject to the bottom. Chapin oftener soared. Beecher abounded more in the bravuras of oratory — was an embodied thunderstorm. Lincoln was superior in the Eastern art of story-telling—the ability to pack the entire meaning of the hour in a pat anecdote. Douglas had more pathos. Curtiss might be better depended upon as a speaker for set occasions. . . . Nevertheless, in the perfect molding of an orator he surpassed each of these. On the whole he was a more interesting and instructive speaker than any of his contemporaries in their palmiest days. This is superlative praise; but the record is true. Let it be written while living witnesses can attest it, and before his eloquence, like the song of Orpheus, fades into a doubtful tradition." James Russell Lowell gives this poetic description of Phillips in the act of speaking: There with one hand behind his back, So simply clear, serenely deep, THE MURDER OF LOVEJOY On November 7, 1837, Elijah P. Lovejoy, an abolitionist editor, was killed by a mob at Alton, Illinois, while defending his printing press. On December 8 a meeting was called at Faneuil Hall, Boston, to dencunce the mob. Attorney-General Austin opposed the resolutions offered, declaring that "Lovejoy died as the fool dieth." Wendell Phillips, then but twentysix years of age, remarked to a friend that such a speech made in that sacred place should be answered then and there. "Answer it yourself,” said his friend. "Help me to the platform and I will," was the reply. Phillips, thus urged, made his way forward, sprang to the platform, and spoke as follows: Mr. Chairman, we have met for the freest discussion of these resolutions, and the events which gave rise to them. I hope I shall be permitted to express my surprise at the sentiments of the last speaker, surprise not only at such sentiments from such a man, but at the applause they have received within these walls. A comparison has been drawn between the events of the Revolution and the tragedy at Alton. We have heard it asserted here, in Faneuil Hall, that Great Britain had a right to tax the colonies, and we have heard the mob at Alton, the drunken murderers of Lovejoy, compared to those patriot fathers who threw the tea overboard. Fellow citizens, is this Faneuil Hall doctrine? The mob at Alton were met to wrest from a citizen his just rights, met to resist the laws. We have been told that our fathers did the same, and the glorious mantle of Revolutionary precedent has been thrown over the mobs of our day. To make out their title to such defense the gentleman says that the British Parliament had a right to tax these colonies. It is manifest that without this his parallel falls to the ground, for Lovejoy had stationed himself within constitutional bulwarks. He was not only defending the freedom of the press, but he was under his own roof in arms, with the sanction of the civil authority. The men who assailed him went against and over the laws. The mob, as the gentleman terms it — mob, forsooth! certainly we sons of the tea spillers are a marvelously patient, generation !—the "orderly mob" which assembled in the Old South to destroy the tea were met to resist not the laws but illegal exactions. Shame on the American who calls the tea tax and stamp act laws! Our fathers resisted not the king's prerogative but the king's usurpation. To find any other account, you must read our Revolutionary history upside down. Our state archives are loaded with arguments of John Adams to prove the taxes laid by the British Parliament unconstitutional, beyond its power. It was not till this was made out that the men of New England rushed to arms. The arguments of the Council Chamber and the House of Representatives preceded and sanctioned the contest. To draw the argument of our ancestors into a precedent for mobs, for a right to resist laws we ourselves have enacted, is an insult to their memory. The difference between the excitements of those days and our own, which the gentleman in kindness to the latter has overlooked, is simply this: the men of that day went for the right as secured by the laws. (They were the people rising to sustain the laws and constitution of the Province. The rioters of our day go for their own wills, right or wrong. Sir, when I heard the gentleman lay down principles which place the murderers of Alton side by side with Otis and Hancock, with Quincy and Adams, I thought those pictured lips would have broken into voice to rebuke the recreant American, the slanderer of the dead. The gentleman said that he should sink into insignificance if he dared to gainsay the principles of these resolutions. Sir, for the sentiments he has uttered on soil consecrated by the prayers of Puritans and the blood of patriots the earth should have yawned and swallowed him up. ९९ The gentleman says Lovejoy was presumptuous and imprudent, he died as the fool dieth." And a reverend clergyman of the city tells us that no citizen has a right to publish opinions disagreeable to the community! If any mob follows such publication, on him rests the guilt. He must wait forsooth till the people come up to it and agree with him. This libel on liberty goes on to say that the want of right to speak as we think is an evil inseparable from republican institutions. If this be so, what are they worth? Welcome the despotism of the Sultan where one knows what he may publish and what he may not, rather than the tyranny of this many-headed monster the mob, where we know not what we may do or say till some fellow citizen has tried it and paid for the lesson with his life. This clerical absurdity chooses as a check for the abuses of the press, not the law but the dread of the mob. By so doing it deprives not only the individual and the minority of their rights, but the majority also, since the expression of their opinion may sometimes provoke disturbance from the minority. A few men may make a mob as well as many. The majority then have no right as Christian men to utter their sentiments if by any possibility it may lead to a mob. Shades of Hugh Peters and John Cotton, save us from such pulpits! Imprudent to defend the liberty of the press! Why? Because the defense was unsuccessful? Does success gild crime into patriotism, and the want of it change heroic self-devotion into imprudence? Was Hampden imprudent when he drew the sword and threw away the scabbard? Yet he, judged by that single hour, was unsuccessful? After a short exile the race he hated sat again upon the throne. Imagine yourself present when the first news of Bunker Hill battle reached a New England town. The tale would have run thus: "The patriots are routed, the redcoats victorious, Warren lies dead upon the field." With what scorn would that Tory have been received who should have charged Warren with imprudence, who should have said that, bred as a physician, he was out of place" in the battle, and "died as the fool dieth"! How would the intimation have been received that Warren and his associates should have waited a better time? ९९ Presumptuous to assert the freedom of the press on American ground! Is the assertion of such freedom before the age? So much before the age as to leave one no right to make it because it displeases the community? Who invents this libel on his country? It is this very thing that entitles Lovejoy to greater praise. The disputed right which provoked the revolution - taxation without representationis far beneath that for which he died. As much as thought is better than money, so much is the cause in which Lovejoy died nobler than a mere question of taxes. James Otis thundered in this hall when the king did but touch his pocket. Imagine if you can his indignant eloquence had England offered to put a gag upon his lips. JOHN BROWN This is taken from the speech delivered at Plymouth Church, Brooklyn, New York, in November, 1859. I know, ladies and gentlemen, that, educated as you have been by the experience of the last ten years, you would think me the silliest as well as the most cowardly man in the world if I should come, with my twenty years behind me, and talk about anything else to-night except that great example which one man has set us on the banks of the Potomac. You expected, of course, that I should tell you my opinion of it. I value this element that Brown has introduced into American politics. The South is a great power. There are no cowards in Virginia. It was not cowardice. Now I try to speak very plainly, but you will misunderstand me. There is no cowardice in Virginia. The people of the South are not cowards. The lunatics in the Gospel were not cowards when they said, "Art thou come to torment us before the time?" They were brave enough, but they saw afar off. They saw the tremendous power that was entering into that charmed circle; they knew its inevitable victory. Virginians did not tremble at an old gray-headed man at Harpers Ferry; they trembled at a John Brown in every man's own conscience. He had been there many years, and, like that terrific scene which Beckford has drawn for us in his Hall of Eblis, where all ran round, each man with an incurable wound in his bosom, and agreed not to speak of it, so the South has been running up and down its political and social life, and every man keeps his right hand pressed on the secret and incurable sore, with an understood agreement, in |