"Some men such rare parts have that they can swim
If favor nor occasion help not them."
Phillips stands conspicuous above most of his time, as the advocate
of human rights, the defender of the oppressed. By happy fortune, he
enjoys the privilege denied to senators, of speaking unencumbered by
convention or caucus. His speeches have the highest qualities of an
orator. In range of thought, clearness of statement, keen satire,
brilliant wit, personal anecdote, wholesome moral sentiment, the
Puritan spirit, they are unmatched by any of the great orators of his
time. They have, besides, the rare merit, and one in which our public
men have been painfully deficient, of straightforwardness and truth
to the hour. They are addressed to the conscience of the country, are
spoken in the interest of humanity. Many a soldier in the field during
the late war, many a citizen owes his loyalty to hearing his eloquent
words.
Above party, unless it be the honorable and ancient party of mankind,
they embody the temper and drift of the times. How many public men
are here to survive in the pillory of his indignant invectives! The
history of the last thirty years cannot be accurately written without
his facts and anecdotes. There is no great interest of philanthropy in
which he has not been, and still is, active. His words are to be taken
as those of an earnest mind intent on furthering the ends of justice,
interpreted not by their rhetoric, but strict adherence to principle.
Certainly the country has at times hung in the balance of his argument;
cabinets and councils hesitating to do or undo without some regard
to his words, well knowing the better constituency which he better
represents and speaks for,--the people, namely, whose breath can unmake
as it has made.
An earnest, truthful man, he has not shared with other statesmen of his
time in their indifferency nor their despair; and if by some esteemed
a demagogue and disorganizer, such is not his estimate of the part
taken by him in the great issues of the past, political and social. The
friend of progress, he early threw himself into the conflict, addressed
himself to the issues as they rose, rose with them and rode the wave
bravely; sometimes hastening, oftentimes provoking the crisis. What
States would not adventure upon as policy, he espoused as policy and
humanity both. Addressing himself from the first to the great middle
class, whose principles are less corrupted by party politics, in whom
the free destiny of peoples is lodged, he is gathering the elements of
power and authority which, becoming formidable in ability if not in
numbers, must secure the country's confidence, and in due time have
political dictation and rule.
Then, of the new instrumentalities for agitation and reform, the
free Platform derives largely its popularity and efficiency from his
genius. Consider the freedom of speech it invites and maintains, free
as the freest can make it, a stand whereon every one who will gains a
hearing; every opinion its widest scope of entertainment,--the widest
hospitality consistent with the decorum of debate. Hither comes any
one breathing a sentiment of progress, any daring to dissent against
dissent, against progress itself. Here the sexes meet on fair terms.
Here, as not elsewhere, is intimated, if not spoken fittingly, the
popular spirit and tendency. Here come the most effective speakers
by preference to address a free constituency, a constituency to be
theirs, if not already, their words leaping into type from their lips,
to be spread forthwith to the four winds by the reporting press. 'Tis
a school of debate, for oratory, for thought, for practice; has the
remarkable merit of freshness, originality; questions affecting the
public welfare being here anticipated, first deliberated upon by the
people themselves; systems of agitation organized and set on foot
for creating a wholesome popular sentiment; in short, for giving
inspiration, a culture, to the country, which the universities cannot;
training the reason and moral sense by direct dealing with principles
and persons as occasion requires; a school from whence have graduated
not a few of our popular speakers,--the Orator himself, whose speeches
furnish passages for collegiate declamation, from which politicians
plume their rhetoric to win a borrowed fame. Cato said, "An orator was
a good man skilled in the art of speaking."
More than any lecturer, unless it be Emerson, he has made the lecture
a New-England, if not an American institution; is always heard with
profit and pleasure by the unprejudiced auditor,--any course in the
cities and towns being thought incomplete without his. Nor is it
easy to estimate the debt of the free States to his speeches before
associations, conventions, in pulpits, the humblest places where his
words could be secured. He has already taken his place beside Garrison,
has linked his name with the Liberator's, to be on men's lips while the
word _slave_ has significance.
If there be any one to whom the country is more largely indebted than
another for eminent services in his day, it must be Garrison; unless
a doubt may arise in the minds of some, if the hero of Harper's Ferry
be not entitled to like honors, since to these illustrious men must be
attributed the merit of having struck the most effective blows for the
overthrow of slavery, the one inaugurating the era of emancipation, and
the other consummating it.
"The just man's like a rock, that turns the wroth
Of all the raging waters into a froth."
The agitation and outside pressure which they were chiefly instrumental
in furthering to its rightful issues, were the most powerful
auxiliaries, if not the power itself, which emancipated the mind of
the country from its subserviency to the slave dominion. They were
the creators of the sentiment that freed the negro at last from his
bonds and cleared the way for a true Republican State. Some power
superior to the Constitution was required to revise it, and free
the whole people from this Arachne's coil that had bound them so
long; was especially needed to extricate the rulers themselves from
its meshes, and to rescue the rights thus imperilled by unscrupulous
placemen who shrunk from the task. These could not help them, caught
in the same snare that bound the nation. "Neither the law, nor the
Constitution, nor the whole system of American institutions," they
were told, "ever had contemplated a case as likely to arise under our
system in which a resort would be necessary to provide outside of the
law and Constitution for amending the Constitution." The case arose,
nevertheless, and was provided for by these powerful agitators, and by
the progress of events. The late civil outbreak compelled the necessary
amendments, sweeping the compromises, the slave Congress and territory
from the statute books and the country itself.
"Principles like fountains flow round forever,
Being in a state of perpetual agitation."
"To all new truths, all renovations of old truths," says
Coleridge, "it must be as in the ark between the destroyed and the
about-to-be-renovated world. The raven must be sent out before the
dove, and ominous controversy must precede peace and the olive wreath."