that very executive, who is bound by the very responsibility that rests on him to keep his mind impartial as to the guilt of the person arraigned, hastens down to Richmond, hurries to the platform, and proclaims to the assembled commonwealth of Virginia: "The man is a murderer and ought to be hanged." Almost every lip in the state might have said it, except that single lip of its governor ; and the moment he had uttered these words, in the theory of the English law, it was not possible to impanel an impartial jury in the commonwealth of Virginia; it was not possible to get the materials and the machinery to try him according to even the ugliest pattern of English jurisprudence. And yet the New York press daily prints the accounts of the trial. Trial! The Inquisition used to break every other bone in a man's body, and then lay him on a pallet, giving him neither counsel nor opportunity to consult one, and then wring from his tortured mouth something like a confession, and call it a trial. But it was heaven-robed innocence compared with the trial, or what the New York press calls so, that has been going on in startled, frightened Charleston. I speak what I know, and I speak what is but the breath and whisper of the summer breezes compared with the tornado of rebuke that will come back from the press of Great Britain, when they hear that we affect to call that a jury trial, and blacken the names of judge and jury by baptizing these pirate orgies with such honorable appellations. Do you suppose that these things mean nothing? What the tender and poetic youth dreams to-day, and conjures up with inarticulate speech, is to-morrow the vociferated result of public opinion, and the day after is the charter of nations. The sentiments we raise to intellect, and from intellect to character, the American people have begun to feel. The mute eloquence of the fugitive slave has gone up and down the highways and byways of the country. This blow, like the first blow at Lexington, heard around the world—this blow at Harpers Ferry reveals men. Watch those about you, and you will see more of the temper and unheeded purpose and real moral position of men than you would imagine. This is the way nations are to be judged. Be not in a hurry; it will come soon enough from this sentiment. We stereotype feeling into intellect, and then into statutes, and finally into national character. We have got the first stage of growth. Nature's live growths crowd out and rive dead matter. Ideas strangle statutes. Pulse beats wear down granite, whether piled in jails or capitols. The people's hearts are the only title deeds, after all. John Brown's movement against slavery is exactly the same. Wait awhile, and you'll all agree with me. What is fanaticism to-day is the fashionable creed to-morrow, and trite as the multiplication table a week after. John Brown has stirred omnipotent pulses. Hope! there is hope everywhere. It is only the universal history: Right forever on the scaffold, Wrong forever on the throne; TOUSSAINT L'OUVERTURE This selection is taken from a speech which was first delivered in 1861, and afterwards repeated time and again in lyceum courses throughout the North. It is one of Phillips's best-known utterances and was enchanting to his audiences. If I were to tell you the story of Napoleon, I should take it from the lips of Frenchmen, who find no language rich enough to paint the great captain of the nineteenth century. Were I to tell you the story of Washington, I should take it from your hearts-you, who think no marble white enough on which to carve the name of the Father of his Country. But I am to tell you the story of a negro, Toussaint L'Ouverture, who has left hardly one written line. I am to glean it from the reluctant testimony of his enemies, men who despised him because he was a negro and a slave, hated him because he had beaten them in battle. Cromwell manufactured his own army. Napoleon, at the age of twenty-seven, was placed at the head of the best troops Europe ever saw. Cromwell never saw an army till he was forty; this man never saw a soldier till he was fifty. Cromwell manufactured his army out of what? Englishmen, the best blood in Europe; out of the middle class of Englishmen, the best blood of the island. And with it he conquered what? Englishmen— their equals. This man manufactured his army out of what? Out of what you call the despicable race of negroes, debased, demoralized by two hundred years of slavery, one hundred thousand of them imported into the island within four years, unable to speak a dialect intelligible even to each other. Yet out of this mixed and, as you say, despicable mass he forged a thunderbolt and hurled it at what? At the proudest blood in Europe, the Spaniard, and sent him home conquered; at the most warlike blood in Europe, the French, and put them under his feet; at the pluckiest blood in Europe, the English, and they skulked home to Jamaica. Now if Cromwell was a general, at least this man was a soldier. Now, blue-eyed Saxon, proud of your race, go back with me to the commencement of the century, and select what statesman you please. Let him be either American or European; let him have a brain the result of six generations of culture; let him have the ripest training of university routine; let him add to it the better education of practical life; crown his temples with the silver locks of seventy years, and show me the man of Saxon lineage for whom his most sanguine admirer will wreathe a laurel rich as embittered foes have placed on the brow of this negro,-rare military skill, profound knowledge of human nature, content to blot out all party distinctions, and trust a state to the blood of its sons, — anticipating Sir Robert Peel fifty years, and taking his station by the side of Roger Williams, before any Englishman or American had won the right; and yet this is the record which the history of rival states makes up for this inspired black of San Domingo. Some doubt the courage of the negro. Go to Haiti, and stand on those fifty thousand graves of the best soldiers France ever had, and ask them what they think of the negro's sword. I would call him Napoleon, but Napoleon made his way to empire over broken oaths and through a sea of blood. This man never broke his word. I would call him Cromwell, but Cromwell was only a soldier, and the state he founded went down with him into his grave. I would call him Washington, but the great Virginian held slaves. This man risked his empire rather than permit the slave trade in the humblest village of his dominions. You think me a fanatic, for you read history not with your eyes but with your prejudices. But fifty years hence, when truth gets a hearing, the muse of history will write Phocion for the Greek, Brutus for the Roman, Hampden for England, Fayette for France, choose Washington as the bright consummate flower of our earlier civilization, then, dipping her pen in the sunlight, will write in the clear blue, above them all, the name of the soldier, the statesman, the martyr, Toussaint L'Ouverture. HENRY WARD BEECHER Henry Ward Beecher (1813–1887) was the product of the best culture of New England. His father, Lyman Beecher, was the most celebrated preacher of his generation. Every advantage that the father could offer to fit his son for high position was opened to him. He was placed in the Boston Latin School at twelve; two years were spent at Mt. Pleasant Academy, Amherst, Massachusetts; four years at Amherst College, and three years at Lane Theological Seminary, Cincinnati, Ohio, of which his father had been chosen president. Henry a good scholar." His course at Lane Seminary was the most important of his education. It was a time of hard study, intellectual broadening, and great spiritual activity. He was a close student of Milton and Shakespeare, but he declares that he owes more to the book of Acts and the writings. of the Apostle Paul than to all other books put together." But his general education had only begun with these things. ་་ |