Wendell Phillips; the faith of an American

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Copyright N°

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

n