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COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT.

WENDELL PHILLIPS

WENDELL PHILLIPS

THE FAITH OF AN AMERICAN

BY GEORGE EDWARD WOODBERRY

PRINTED FOR THE

WOODBERRY SOCIETY

1912

COPYRIGHT, 191 2, BY GEORGE E. WOODBERRY

£C!.A3122G0

»i^

THIS ADDRESS WAS DELIVERED ON NOVEMBER 29, 1 91 I BEFORE THE WOODBERRY SOCIETY AND ITS FRIENDS AT ITS FIRST MEETING, IN THE HALL OF THE GROLIER CLUB, NEW YORK, TO MARK THE ONE HUNDREDTH ANNIVERSARY OF THE BIRTH OF WENDELL PHILLIPS

WENDELL PHILLIPS

THE FAITH OF AN AMERICAN

I THANK you, Mr. President; and, my friends, no words can express the pleasure I take in this welcome, nor my sense of the honor you have done me. I greet the Society at the beginning of its career ; and it is a great happiness to find myself asked to link with the occasion the memory of a man who was to me, and still is, one of the masters of my life.

I want to tell you how it was that Wen- dell Phillips came to be, in my eyes, the ideal American. Do you realize what it was to be a boy in the days of the Civil War.? Almost my first clear memory is of the family table when one of my older broth- ers burst in at the door, crying out," They have fired on Sumter!"So deeply was that scene imprinted on my eyes that I can still see ho w^ every one looked. A few days later a tall tree from the old family wood-

2 WENDELL PHILLIPS

lot lay Stripped of its branches in the yard, like a mast, — our flag-pole; and from it the flag floated throughout the war. The young soldiers were camped on the com- mon where I played, opposite the house; and when they went off to war, my father made them the farewell speech. I can see, as if it were yesterday, the reading of the evening newspaper after their first battle, for one son of the house, a cousin, was with them ; and I can see the letter which two years later brought the message of his death. I picked lint, as every one did, for the wounded after Gettysburg. My earli- est literary treasure, which was the file of my Sunday-school paper, I sent off' to the army for soldiers' reading. I suppose it was my dearest possession. I remember the early April dawn when I was waked by the bells ringing for Lee's surrender, and the darker morning of Lincoln's death. I recall that the boy who told me the news was seated on the arm of a wheelbarrow ;

WENDELL PHILLIPS 3

and as I ran home, frightened and awed, I saw men crying in the street and heard women weeping in the houses, and while I was telling my tale, the bells began to toll.

Four years of this. I was but a child, but I shared the emotion of a nation. I do not think one can overestimate .the power of such an experience to permeate and, as it were, drench the soul. I beheve it gave moral depth to my nature, and lodged the principle of devotion to great causes in the very beatings of my heart. I was born at once, from the first flash of my intelligence, into the world of ideas; my first emotions were exercised in a na- tion's pulses; high instin6ls put forthCiri my breast. I was but one of thousands. I do not wish to appear singular, or to ex- aggerate. This is merely what it was to be a boy in those days. But child though I was, I feel that I cannot exaggerate the passion that was poured along my veins

4 WENDELL PHILLIPS

in boyhood; and, as the commotion of the strife slowly subsided in the stormy mea- sures of the period of reconstru6lion, my growing youth was still fed on great and impersonal issues of the large world. I was a school-boy, but 1 knew more about negro rights than Latin grammar, Santo Domingo better than the Peloponne- sus; and the Franco-Prussian War, which broke out in my last school-year, was more to me than the entire outlines of ancient and modern history. Public inter- ests had become the habit of my mind; and contemporary events were always more interesting to me than my studies. My first recolleft ion of hearing Wen- dell Phillips is from my college days, though of course he was always one of my heroes, and I may have heard him be- fore, for we were an anti-slavery family. A gentleman of uncommon distin6lion in look and bearing, talking in an un- commonly conversational manner without

WENDELL PHILLIPS 5

raising his voice, and with nothing very much to say, — that was the impression, almost disconcerting to an admirer; one was tempted to wish he would wake up and show his mettle; but you listened. Then the first thing you noticed was that people were taking up their hats ; he was done. There was no sense that time had passed. He bound me with a spell. I cannot describe his oratory. I have heard many others make addresses ; I never heard any other man speak. I measure the intensity of the impression he made upon me by the fa6l that, while I have very little of what is called power of visualization in memory, there are certain sentences of his which, as I have been lately reading his speeches, bring the whole man before me. I hear his intonations, I see his attitude, as if his voice were still sounding in my ears and his form standing before my eyes. "Des- potism looks down into the poor man's cradle, and knows it can crush resistance

6 WENDELL PHILLIPS

and curb ill-will. Democracy sees the bal- lot in that baby-hand;" — you saw him stand above the cradle; you felt that, in comparison with that "baby-hand," the sceptres of monarchs were as dust in the balances of power. " If these things are so, the boy is born who will write the Decline and Fall of the American Republic;" — I thought that boy was sitting by me in the next seat. There was such vividness in his eloquence. And, in the old phrase, persuasion sat upon his lips. You believed what he said while he spoke. I remember a friend of mine in Lincoln, Nebraska, a gold Democrat, who was his host, relat- ing to me in illustration of this the effe6l of Phillips's private talk: "Why, Wood- berry," he said, "it was two days before I got back to my right senses on the cur- rency question." I heard him seldom; but hearing him thus at intervals and at a dis- tance, ripening now to years of manhood, not suddenly nor with any intention of

WENDELL PHILLIPS 7

my own the spell deepened in me; and unconsciously, as it were, the patriotic passion that had consecrated my boyhood rose up and swore allegiance to this mas- ter example of a civic life. There was my sense and feeling of his magnetic power; there was, perhaps, the temperamental sympathy that has since made me, as you know, a past-master in heresies ; but, more than this, there was the craving of the human heart for a hving personality from which to draw strength in its faith. Of all the leaders of that time he alone was to me a living person ; only from him did I have that touch which is, from genera- tion to generation, the laying on of the hands of hfe.

I came to feel him yet more near. I met him once or twice. The first time was in my brother's store. He spent two sum- mers at Beverly, during which I was for the most part away. He used to come up for his mail, and would step into the store

8 WENDELL PHILLIPS

to read his letters and talk for an hour or so every morning ; and so he became for us, in away, a household memory ; and he left two mementoes of himself, illustrating two sides of his nature, — one, a portrait of John Brown ; the other, a Greek terra- cotta mask of a woman 's face , from Charles Sumner's colle6lion, as beautiful an ex- ample as I ever saw. Sometimes a child — he spoke to all the children on the street — would come in for his autograph; and he wrote, as was his well-known custom, the words," Peace, if possible ; but justice at any rate." These are memories of his age. There was another Phillips, of whom I will speak later. This was the Phillips that I knew, — an old gray man, simple, kindly, serene; a gentleman in every line of his fine features, in every motion, in every fibre ; a type never to be forgotten by eyes that saw him. At a little distance, especially when he wore his great over- coat, he might have been taken for some

WENDELL PHILLIPS 9

old farmer. It was thus he looked at Arnold's le6lure when he spoke some after- words of truth about Emerson. In the streets of Boston, toward the end, he seemed a somewhat lonely figure, I used to think. I remember Nora Perry, the poetess, who knew him well, telling me of his meeting her once there and asking where she was going. "To see a friend,'' she replied. "Ah," he said, "you remind me of the Frenchman who received the same answer, and said, * Take me along. I never saw one. '"Phillips had friends, and I have known some of them who have enriched my impression of him as a per- sonality; but in early life he had few, and a man, though he have many friends, may sometimes feel like that.

Of course I do not mean to pronounce any eulogy on Wendell Phillips, or to re- view that career, — one of the most dra- matic in the annals of American biogra- phy,— though it tempts my pen. Others,

lO WENDELL PHILLIPS

whose lips are more skilled than mine in public encomium, will do that to-night before great audiences ; the present lead- ers of those causes which he championed at their birth will bring him praise ; the race to whom he devoted his prime, chief mourner at his grave, will deck the sod with flowers and cover his memory with gratitude. We are but a little band of friends gathered together to consider the lesson of his life. I desire, as the leader of our thoughts, to regard him independ- ently of the transitory events and mea- sures of his career, and rather to set forth what was fundamental in that spirit, of which his a6ls and words were merely the mortal phenomena.

That spirit, most stri6lly stated, was the soul of New England. He was a New Englander, a Bostonian, and yet more narrowly, a Boston Puritan. I refer not so much to his birth, as to his substance. The pivotal points of human history seem

WENDELL PHILLIPS 11

often ridiculously small. You remember Lowell's fine sentence: "On a map of the world you may cover Judea with your thumb, Athens with a finger-tip; but they still lord it in the thought and a6lion of every civilized man/' The Puri- tan spirit is a similar phenomenon. It pre- sents the same union of intense localiza- tion with a world-wide sweep of principle. Wendell Phillips was that burning nu- cleus made a living soul, whose vibrations were sent through a people. Moral depth was the distinguishing trait of his nature; remorseless logic was the biting edge of his mind. He sent his roots so far down that they seemed to clasp the very rock of righteousness, and thereby he towered the more in the intellectual air of truth. You may know a Boston man by two traits — not that he has any exclusive owner- ship of them: he thinks he knows, and he thinks he is right. In a world prone to error men smile at such claims ; but what

12 WENDELL PHILLIPS

if by chance they should be well founded ? Wendell Phillips did know. Wendell Phil- lips was right. How did he achieve such an uncommon distinftion in a public man.^ Phillips believed in ideas. They were his stock in trade, his armory, his jewels, — what you will. To know them, to pre- sent them, to discuss them, to make them prevail, — that was his life-work. Other men profess to believe in ideas, but usu- ally with some qualification of expedi- ency, of opportunity, of compromise, and with a frequent disposition to rely on other agencies, — favor, money, force; but Phil- lips believed in ideas, rulers by their own nature, vi6lors in their own right, whose advance was as resistless as the motion of matter, inviolable as natural law, — the reign of what ought to be. Children of man's intelligence and man's conscience, ideas are born to the inheritance of the earth. This belief in the power of the un- aided idea to win was a cardinal point in

WENDELL PHILLIPS 13

his convi6lions. It was a corollary of his faith in the soundness of human nature : men can know truth; men can be per- suaded of it; and men — humanity — will not reje6l truth if once it be clear in their minds and hearts.

The great enemy of ideas is institu- tions. Phillips drew in with his New Eng- land milk the temper of that stock which had dethroned a king. He breathed the same transcendental air as Emerson. His view of history was pra6lically that of the Revolutionary fathers, and, in its theo- retical part, that of his great contempora- ries. He had apprehended and thoroughly k mastered the conception of history as the unfolding of the soul of humanity. I nstitu-.^" tions are the successive cells of its habit- ancy, hke the chambered nautilus.

" Build thee more stately mansions^ O my Soul! "

The growth of the soul is a continual emergence, — a breaking of swaddling-

14 WENDELL PHILLIPS

bands, a casting away of outgrown and wornout clothes, a transgression of sa- cred limits, a rending of the veil of the temple, an earthquake-fall of the pillars of the state, a resurrection into higher forms, a revolution into ampler good, an ascent where the free spirit's foot rests ris- ing from the body of the dead past. Institu- tions are shells; as soon as they begin to be uncomfortable, as soon as the living body begins to feel their pressure, to be cabined and confined therein, the walls break ; the young oak explodes the old acorn. Phil- lips was fond of repeating Goethe's simile of the plant in the porcelain vase: "If the pot cannot hold the plant," he would say, " let it crack ! "Civilization laughs at insti- tutions. Order, in the sense of the fixity and permanence of what is, which society enjoins and old men love, is a defe6live conception of public well-being. It maybe heaven's first law, but heaven is a finished place. Change is the password of grow-

WENDELL PHILLIPS 15

ing states. Order means acquiescence, content, a halt; persisted in, it means the atrophy of life, a living death; it is the abdication of progress. We were taught / that the divine discontent in our youthful breasts was the swelling of the buds of the soul ; so there is a divine discontent in the state, which is the motions of its di- vinity within brooding on times to come. Agitation is that part of our intelle6lual / life where vitality resides. There ideas are born, breed, and bring forth. Without in- cessant agitation of ideas, public free dis- cussion, the state is dead. Disorder, in- deed, is a disturbance of our peace, an in- terference with our business, a trouble; but that is its purpose — to trouble. Phillips, quoting Lord Holland, — for he liked to mask his wisdom in a distinguished name, — often said : " We are well aware that the privileges of the people, the rights of free discussion, and the spirit and letter of our popular institutions must render — and

16 WENDELL PHILLIPS

they are intended to render — the contin- uance of an extensive grievance, and of the dissatisfa6lion consequent thereupon, dangerous to the tranquillity of the coun- try, and ultimately subversive of the au- thority of the state." That is the principle which, applied generally, is the univer- sal charter of ideas, under whose freedom ^ they maintain that incessant crumbling of institutions which is the work of growing/ nations.

\{, in Phillips's scheme, ideas are the agents and agitation the means, the end is justice. No word was so dear to him as justice. Every chord of his voice knew its music. It was a God of justice that old New England worshipped; and throne what creed you will in her later churches, the awful imprint of that ancient faith will never fade from the hearts of her old race. The sense of justice is the bed-rock of the Puritan soul. It was this that gave passion- ate convi6fion and iron edge to the little

WENDELL PHILLIPS 1 J

band of anti-slavery apostles with whom Phillips walked, pleaded, and preached through long years of hatred, contumely, and scorn. In the evening of his days that molten glowseemedtodissolve in a golden vision of a world where every man should have an equitable share in the goods of nature and the benefits of civilization, and he saw mankind converging thereto in many lands by many paths.

I cannot fully state nor adequately re- view the particular ideas of Phillips in their number; but I will touch on one or two of the most elementary. He believed in the principle of human equality. He was intelle6f ually the child of that much de- rided but still extant document, the De- claration of Independence. Ideas are only truly alive when they are incarnated in some man. The Rights of Man were as the bone and muscle of Phillips, and the flood of human hope that once streamed from the Declaration, as a lighthouse

l8 WENDELL PHILLIPS

among the nations, made music in his blood and thrilled his nerves. He was, doubtless, sustained in his belief in human equality by his Christian convi6lions of the divine origin and immortal nature of man, and by his unshaken faith in that God who had made of one blood all the nations of the earth, and was a just God. In Christianity the line is so sharply drawn between all other creatures and man," a little lower than the angels," that such a conception of the unity of human nature is almost axiomatic.

I shall not discuss the truth of the do6lrine ; but it lay at the roots of Phil- lips's faith in the people, which was his distinguishing trait as a master of public affairs. No hyperbole can overstate that

^ faith. Phillips believed in ideas, but not in an intelle6lual class who are the pos- sessors and guardians of ideas, and by that fa6l trustees of the masses. He be-

> lieved in ideas, not in the form of know-

WENDELL PHILLIPS I9

ledge, but in the form of wisdom. Know- ledge may belong to the brain of the ^ scholar, but wisdom is the breath of the-^ people. Knowledge is the idea, volatile and abstract, in the mind; but wisdom is the idea dipped in the dyer's vat of life. The ^ masses have political wisdom because the life of the people is the life of the state. An Italian boy, working out taxes on a Sicilian road, said to me once : *' The poor t^ pay with their bodies, Signore."! remem- bered it because the words were almost identical with Lowell's."! am impatient," he said at Birmingham, "of being told>-^ that property is entitled to exceptional consideration because it bears all the bur- dens of the state. It bears those, indeed, which can most easily be borne, but pov- erty pays with its person the chief ex- penses of war, pestilence, and famine." That boy is probably nowin Tripoli, "pay- ing with his person; "that is what I mean by the political idea dipped in the dyer's

20 WENDELL PHILLIPS

vat of life. ''Theories," said Phillips," are pleasing things, and seem to get rid of all difficulties so very easily. One must begin to abstra6l principles and study them.; But ^ wisdom consists in perceiving when hu- man nature and this perverse world ne- cessitate making exceptions to abstraft truths. /Any boy can see an abstradl prin- ciple. Only threescore years and ten can discern precisely when and where it is well, necessary, and right to make an ex- ception to it. That faculty is wisdom, all the rest is playing with counters. And this explains how the influx into politics of a shoal of college-boys, slenderly fur- nished with Greek and Latin," — they are still more slenderly furnished now, — " but steeped in marvellous and delightful ignorance of life and public affairs, is fill- ing the country with free-trade din."

The depositary of this life-wisdom, in state affairs, is the masses. Municipal gov- ernment in America was, in Phillips's

WENDELL PHILLIPS 21

judgment, a failure ; but I cannot think he would have welcomed government by commission as a remedy, or have ever as- sented to that increasing tendency toward government by experts, which is observ- able among us. There is government busi- ness which should be condu6led by com- petent officials ; but government is not a business. It is amazing how government tends to localize itself in a class, which, temporarily dominant in the community under special circumstances, mistakes its interest and j udgment for that of the whole body, and desires to be recognized as the trustee of the others ; government by sol- diers, by lawyers, a business-man's gov- ernment, a banker's government,— what not? All are but instances of a part trying to swallow the whole. It is natural to mis- take one's own point of view for the cen- tre, hard to believe in the possibility of the antipodes where men walk, quite natu- rally, with their heads upside down. I re-

22 WENDELL PHILLIPS

member an English officer at Taormina, a man of cultivation, explaining to me with great cogency and sincerity the advan- tage of settling human disputes by war in- stead of by courts; it was the better way. It is a good point in a king, considered as the head of a government, that he is nei- ther a lawyer, nor a business-man, nor a banker, nor even an independent voter. I have no quarrel with independent voting ; but when a party of independent voters assumes to be the brain and conscience of the state, and thinks to control it by pos- sessing itself of the balance of power, like a clique in a Continental parliament, — and especially if it does this in the name of education or of any superiority residing in it, as if it were that remnant in whom was the safety of Israel, — it is an insolent chal- lenge to populargovernmentand breathes the spirit of the most bigoted autocracy. No. Least of all does it belong to the scholar to distrust the people; least of all

WENDELL PHILLIPS 23

to him whose stake in the country is not property, nor any personal holdings nor gain, but rather his share of human hope for the betterment of man's lot among all nations and in distant ages; least of all to him, the dreamer, to forget where and when and by whom the blows of the in- cessant Revolution, which is the rise of humanity, have been struck.

"All revolutions," said Phillips, "come from below." Had he not seen k? Had he not been thrust out of the world's society, and found all that was organized and re- spe6lable in the state against him? — the more bitter the more high it stood .? He had with his own lips successively consigned to damnation the Church, the Constitution, and the Union because they were doing devil's work. " When I was absorbed into this great movement," he said," I remem- ber well that it found me a very proud man ; proud of the religious, proud of the civil, institutions of the country. Thirty years

24 WENDELL PHILLIPS

have not brought back the young pride nor renewed the young trust. I go out with no faith whatever in institutions." And the lesson he had learned in his own person, history repeated to him from her page. Always against the mighty, the proud, the comfortable, the human mass had surged up under the pressure of its wants and instin6ls in the growth of time. Power, in the end, was theirs: against noble or priest, against learning or wealth, power at last rested with them. ''Keep it," said Phillips; "you can never part with too little, you can never retain too much." Jealousy of power," eternal vigilance," is the first safeguard of a free state. The people parts with power only to find an oppressor in its holder. Tyranny is the ^ first instin6l of power. It is an old maxim of state that power corrupts the hand that wields it." No man is good enough," said Lincoln, "to rule any other man." Jeal- ousy of power is of the essence of the

WENDELL PHILLIPS 25

American spirit, and drawn from its his- toric birth; it may slumber long, but it slumbers light; and to-day the land is full of its mutterings.

How has it fared with the causes Phil- lips committed to the angry sea of public discussion and the stormy decision of the popular tribunal ? He fought in them all ; he responded to every appeal, at home, abroad. After the vi6lory over the arch- foe, slavery, others might sigh, like the good Edmund Quincy, with a feeling of glad rehef, " No more picnics, Wendell ;" but his hand in that grim conflict had so closed round the sword-hilt of speech that it could not loose its grip. He fought on, and his post was always ahead. There are those who thought him foolish, head- strong, erratic, fanatic, wrong; but when was he ever thought otherwise by his op- ponents, or by the indifferent, — men still unenlightened by the event .M make no apologies for him. Examine the record.

u

26 WENDELL PHILLIPS

You can follow the trail of triumphant popular causes by the echoes of that sil- ver voice. Woman suffrage, labor, tem- perance,— these have made giant strides since he was laid to rest. Ireland has home rule at her door. Russia has the Duma. Capital punishment, indeed, still survives, but there has been great advance in the general attitude toward, and treatment of, the criminal and delinquent classes, though there has been occasionally a bar- baric return to the whipping-post, and to- day we hear again on all sides the blood- hound cry for the speedy trial and quick death of the murderer. The initiative, the referendum, and the recall, there can be no doubt, would have had Phillips's hearty cooperation and support. They are but the precipitation of his thought. The recall of the judges would not have dismayed him. He had recalled a judge. The recall of judges is Massachusetts do6frine as old as the state. It is effefted by the will

WENDELL PHILLIPS 27

of the governor, a61ing on a simple ad- dress of the legislature by a majority vote without other ground than the people's de- sire. Edward G. Loring was thus recalled, on the initiative of Phillips and others, for the reason that, although a6iing in a legal and official manner as federal commis- sioner under the Fugitive Slave Act, a *' slave-hunter" — as they called him — was unfit to be a Massachusetts judge. Phillips foretold, as did also Lowell in the Birmingham speech, the present con- fli6t with incorporated wealth. "The great question of the future,'' he said,'* is money against legislation. My friends, you and I shall be in our graves long before that bat- tle is ended ; and unless our children have more patience and courage than saved this country from slavery, republican institu- tions will go down before moneyed corpo- rations. The corporations of America mean^ to govern; and unless some power more radical than ordinary politics is found, will

28 WENDELL PHILLIPS

govern inevitably. The only hope of any effe6lual grapple with the danger lies in rousing the masses whose interests lie permanently in the opposite dire6lion/' Take up the record where you will, if you deny merit to Phillips in his latter-day instindls and pleadings, you must deny wisdom to the a6lual movement of the last thirty years and the plain current of American democratic development at the present day.

If there has been recession anywhere, it is in the matter which lay nearest to Phil- lips's heart, — negro rights, race equality, and in general in the attitude of the public mind toward the principle of an integral humanity, one and the same in all men, which is found in the Declaration. The change of view, which I think no one can doubt, is not peculiar to us, but is world- wide, and is consequent on the spread of European dominion over the so-called backward peoples of Asia and Africa. The

WENDELL PHILLIPS 29

sins of a nation lie close to its virtues. The strength of our age is commerce, resting on industry. It is a thing of vast benefi- cence, and loads with blessings those na- tions whom it benefits ; but like all strength it has its temptations. Our temptation is to exploit the backward nations, and possess ourselves of their lands. If they escape the destru6lion that overtook the Indian, it is because there are too many of them. The conqueror, in old times, when there was a surplus of subje61 populations, enslaved them. We take them into our tutelage. The idea of tutelage readily passes into a conception of our wards as permanently inferior,but economically useful. It breeds the notion of servile races. The question of human equality has broadened. It is no longer a question of a black skin, but of any skin except white ; so true is it that a prejudice against one race is a prejudice against all races, and will finally prove so. I am not going to dispose of the negro

so WENDELL PHILLIPS

question to-night; but I mean to state a few matters of what seems to me elemen- tary truth.

I say nothing of the denial of negro rights by lynching. That is a mere bru- tality. We are shamed in the face of civ- ilized nations as no other of the group, except Russia, has been shamed for cen- turies; but though the impeachment of our humanity is patent, tragic, and terri- ble, I do not believe that the brutalities of recent years are a drop in the bucket in comparison with what the negro race suffered under slavery in old days. They are sporadic ; they are blazed upon by the pitiless publicity of all the world ; they are outlawed, and resemble a6ls of brigand- age. I note only the extension of lynch- ing to white men and the spread of the habit of burning negroes to Northern States. You cannot calmly watch a fire in your neighbor's house ; it will leap to your own roof. You cannot wink at crime in

WENDELL PHILLIPS 31

your neighbor's dooryard; it will soon be in your own. The denial of negro rights by the nullification of the constitutional amendments is a graver matter. I have only this to say, that no student of history can be surprised at a diminishing respe6l for a Constitution that does not maintain itself as the supreme law of the land hon- estly abided by. Phillips stated the true principle: "The proper time to maintain one's rights is when they are denied; the proper persons to maintain them are those to whom they are denied."! devoutly hope that the negroes will so grow in manhood as to be their own saviours in the ful- ness of time, as our own fathers long ago wrenched from the hands of unwilling masters the rights that are now our dear- est possession.

I should have much to say of negro education, were there time. The princi- ple is plain. Demand the same schools for negroes as for white men. There is a

y/

32 WENDELL PHILLIPS

tendency to restri6l negro education to industrial pursuits. It is the same spirit which advocates vocational schools for the children of the laboring classes. It is no longer a question of the black serf, but of the economic animal of any color. I be- lieve in manual training for all children; I believe in vocational schools ; but these latter are, as it were, the professional schools of the workers, and should bear the same relation to a moral and mental training, preparatory to or associated with them , that professional schools bear to the college. The first thing to teach a child is that he has a soul; the first thing to give a boy is an outlook on a moral, intelle6l- ual,and aesthetic world. Not to endow him with that is to leave him without horizons, a human creature blind and deaf, centred in the work of his hands and in physical conditions, — an economic animal. In the educational tendencies to which I refer, there is too much of man as an economic

WENDELL PHILLIPS 33

animal. The negro is no more so than the white man. Give the negroes, then, the same schools as the whites ; give the sons of the laboring classes the same schools as all other children of the state, — citizen schools.

Man is an economic animal, but he is not primarily that; and he should not be educated primarily with a view to that, but to his being a man. The workers should always be jealously on their guard against any principle of caste. The inter- ests of the negroes will finally be found to be permanently identical with those of the working class everywhere, and labor should never acquiesce in any social view or arrangement which contemplates the laboring mass of men with hands lifted and shoulders bowed to receive the bur- den from a higher class more fortunately endowed to be their masters. You can ac- knowledge your inferiority to others in acquirements, capacity , efficiency ; but you

34 WENDELL PHILLIPS

cannot acknowledge inferiority in your being. You may lay the humblest tasks upon yourself, as saints and sages besides Milton have done; but you yourself must lay them on. If our economic system neces- sarily embodies a principle of caste, why, then, as Phillips said, "let it crack! "Let it go the way of many another institution that once seemed all powerful and of the very substance of necessity, to the heap of old shards !

'■''For what avail The plow and sail"

unless the man be free .^I deplore the tem- per which acquiesces in the conception of permanent servile classes in the state, ed- ucated to be such, and the spirit of def- erence thereto, on whatsoever ground it may be based. It is not by deference that men win their rights. It is not by denying their own share in the spiritual nature of man and their participation in the high heritage of civilization that men mount in

WENDELL PHILLIPS 35

that realm and possess themselves of that good.

There is one other point. A race is judged, with regard to its capacity, like a poet, not by its normal and average pro- du6l, but by its best. That is the rule. I suppose that the most immortal oration of Wendell Phillips, as a formal produ6lion, is that onToussaint L'Ouverture. I can re- member the hour and the place when in my boyhood I discovered Shakspere, By- ron, Shelley, Carlyle, Scott, Tasso, Virgil, Homer ; but there are some names I seem always to have known. The Bible, Wash- ington, Whittier, Milton, William Tell, Algernon Sidney, Garibaldi, Toussaint L'Ouverture, mix their figures with the shadows of my very dawn of life. I sup- pose I owe Toussaint L'Ouverture to Phil- lips. The speech is a marvellous example of oratorical art, and will be treasured through generations by negroes as the first eulogy of a man of their race. No

36 WENDELL PHILLIPS

one who has read it can ever forget its peroration, when the orator, sinking to his close, like the sun setting in the sea, seemed to fill the earth with light, and touched with his glory the mountain-peaks of history, — summits of human achieve- ment, Phocion, Brutus, Hampden, La Fayette, Washington, John Brown, — and high overall poured his light onToussaint L'Ouverture; high over all, not in arms, letters, or arts, but in moral greatness, which all men agree is the supreme ex- cellence of man.

There is one thing that latitude and longitude do not bound, nor geography, nor climate, nor ancestry, nor poverty, >/ nor ignorance, nor previous condition of barbarism, — one capacity, at least, com- mon to mankind, moral power. Who of us has not, at some time or other, stood amazed and reverent before some simple human a6l, among the humble, in which the soul shone forth, as if disapparelled

WENDELL PHILLIPS 37

of its poor belongings, in its own nature? I believe that the race which is thus capa- ble of moral power can scale all other heights. It may be that the negroes, con- sidered with a view to their social utility, like all other masses of men, are capable only of an economic ^rvice. That is the main task of mankind. But beware of clos- ing the gates of mercy on those young ambitions, those forward instin6ls, the prayers and struggles of the waking soul of a race ! Give the negroes a true univer- sity,— a white man's university. The trials and discouragements of genius are an old and sad story in our own annals. Think what the burden must be that rests on negro efforts. I say these things with no desire to trouble the waters, as indeed I have no right. I know that negro ed- ucation is in conscientious and devoted hands. But these were things dear to Phil- lips's heart; they are a part of the sacred heritage he entrusted to those who were

38 WENDELL PHILLIPS

touched by his spirit and should follow his leading.

It is obvious that I regard negro rights as a part of a larger matter, gradually fusing with the attitude of public thought toward all race questions. The revolution- ary principle of human equality flows now in a world channel. I am more concerned with the future of the backward nations, and our part therein. Something might be said in behalf of the integrity of indigenous ideals by one who, like myself, knows no absolute truth, and looks on all institutions as human, — the house of life which gen- erations and races build for themselves out of their own hearts and thoughts for a temporary abiding place. But the notion of the universal integrity of the soul of humanity, one and the same in all races, involves that of their union in one civiliza- tion, since truth is universal. The truth of man is as universal as the truth of mat- ter, and, under present conditions of com-

WENDELL PHILLIPS 39

mimication, must in the end draw the na- tions together.

The recent advance of the backward nations is hardly realized by us. They have made more speed in progress rela- tively than ourselves. We have progressed in knowledge of the nature of matter, in the mechanic arts, and in economic organization, — things easily communi- cated and to be quickly appropriated. In certain matters, it is to be remembered, some of the backward nations have a greater past than ourselves, in art and in thought, for example. I myself regard America as a backward nation in her own group. We have had but one original thinker in the last generation, William James, and I had to go to Europe to find it out; they do not seem to know it yet in Boston. A brief conta6f with Continental thought and affairs is sufficient to reveal, not only the finer quality, variety, and potency of civilizing power there, but the

40 WENDELL PHILLIPS

great gap by which we fail of their real- ized advance in ideas, measures, and an- ticipations. There one feels the pulses of the world. I cannot overstate my sense of the degree in which we lag behind in all that concerns the world except trade. I feel the more regret, therefore, when I observe the weakening of our hold on the one great principle that has distin- guished us as a nation, — our sense of po- litical justice, in which we have stood at least equally with France and England in the van. America's title to glory among ^ the nations is her service to human lib- erty. I can bear that we should fail, rela- tively, in art and letters, have little sense of beauty, or skill in man's highest wis- dom, philosophic thought, or in his high- est facuhy , imagination ; but I cannot bear that we should fail in justice. I cannot bear that we should tear the Declaration across, revoke our welcome to the poor of all the earth, tyrannize over weaker states, con-

WENDELL PHILLIPS 41

du6l our diplomacy on a basis of trade in- stead of right, or abate by a hair's breadth our standard of human respe6l for all mankind. I lament the acquiescence of the times in a general recreancy to our fa- y thers' principles. " The feet of the aveng- ^ ing hours are shod with wool/' said the old Greeks. In the end God takes his price. But I pray that America may yet long maintain at home and abroad that Decla- ration which at our birth lit the hopes of all the world.

I have wearied you with long talking ; but my heart is in my words. It has be- come plain as I have been speaking that I have set forth some elements of the American ideal, and that at the heart of that ideal is a faith. Phillips embodied it. We all need a faith, however we may strive to be rationalistic, agnostic, and to move only on the sure ground of ascer- tained truth. Without faith we are with- out horizons, a line of march, something

42 WENDELL PHILLIPS

ahead. All great rallying cries are in the future. Faith is beyond us, — our better part ; it is the complement of the Ameri- can ideal, its atmosphere and heavenly sustenance. The faith of one age is the fa6l of the next ; and then how differently it looks ! The faft seems as if it had always been. When the vi61:or is crowned, his path to the goal looks as plain and straight as the king's highway. Who could miss that road ^ How simple was Phillips's ca- reer ! It was a case of the hour for the man as well as the man for the hour, from his first sally when the unknown youth of twenty-four climbed the platform of Fan- ueil Hall, and at the first blow threw his already triumphing opponent dead and forever dishonored on the field. How pra6lical he was ! Defeat and vi6lory alike were weapons in his hands. He had been preaching disunion for a quarter of a cen- tury when he stepped forth as the chief orator of the Union cause. He was capable

WENDELL PHILLIPS 43

of that great reversal. He welcomed all instruments, — yes, welcomed "dynamite and the dagger" in their place, while Harvard sat spell-bound at the rapt and daring defense of the world-proscribed cause by the lonely truth-teller. Do you wonder that the people loved their great tribune at the last? Boston to-day has seen from dawn to midnight such a commem- oration as the city has not witnessed in my time, — the people's tribute. Other re- cent centennials have been rather con- ventional affairs; but to-day the Boston pavements that he loved, as he said, from when his mother's hands held up his toddling steps, have waked their music, and every footfall has been a note in the thanksgiving psalm of the city for a son worthy of his birthplace.

How simple it seems now! But we, — our causes are doubtful." We are but one or two," we say. Did crowds go with him .? "We shall be discredited. "Did he move

y

44 WENDELL PHILLIPS

amid applause? "And then, the risks," we add. Did he run none? You need not fear that your shoulder to the wheel will greatly accelerate anything in this old world; a thousand elements of power must conjoin in any great forward and revo- lutionary change. The fate of the world speeds only when the horses of the god draw the car. It is impossible to lead life without taking risks. I know that much that I have said to-night is heavy with risk. The willingness to take risks is one gauge of faith. Risk is a part of God's game, alike for men and nations. You must look down the mouth of a revolver to learn how often it misses the mark. Poltroonery steadies the aim of the foe. Death is not the worst of life. Defeat is not the worst of failures. Not to have tried is the true failure. Above all, do not draw back because everything is not plain, and you may, perhaps, be mistaken. Obscurity is always the air of the present hour. "At

WENDELL PHILLIPS 45

the evening time," please God, "there shall be light."

No great career opens before us. For us if in our daily lives we make one per- son a little happier every day,— and that is not hard to do if one attends to it, — it is enough ; but should the hour come to any one of us, and that rallying cry be heard from out the dim future, his place is in the ranks, though mere food for powder. I am speaking of the battlefields and heroes of peace, and of what may easily happen. For that soul which is one and the same in the rich and the poor, the wise and the ignorant, the good and the bad,— a moral power,— may answer to the divine prompting in one as in another. Men differ in place, honor, and influence, but there is one seamless garment of life for all.

There is one lesson that blazes from Phillips's memory,— the principle of sac- rifice as an integral element in normal life.

46 WENDELL PHILLIPS

He gave all, — fortune, fame, friends. I am not thinking of that initial step. I am think- ing of his home. That plain New England house, that almost ascetic home, scantily furnished for simple needs, — a rich man's home, as wealth was then accounted in that community, — foregoing enjoyments, re- finements, luxuries, natural to the mas- ter's birth and tastes, in order that the un- fortunate might be less miserable, is the monument by which in my mind I remem- ber him: a life of daily sacrifice. This is, as it were, our baptismal night. I wish I might dip you in these spiritual waters. It is noth- ing that we are humble. The humblest life may be a life of sacrifice; and the poorer it is, generally, the greater is the sacri- fice. Light is the same in the sun and in the candle:

" How far that little candle throws his beams I So shines a good deed in a naughty world."

B 29 1912

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