The great orator, thinker, and leader was of the best blood of New England. Educated, brilliant, aristocratic, he gave his life to the lowly. No such self-sacrifice can ever be forgotten. His name will live as long as American history is read.

Wendell Phillips was born in a stately mansion on Beacon Street, Boston, Nov. 29, 1811, the eighth in a family of nine children. The father was the Hon. John Phillips, a rich merchant, a judge of the Court of Common Pleas, a member of the corporation of Harvard College, and of the convention which revised the Constitution of the State; elected to the House of Representatives, and later to the Senate till his death; the first mayor of Boston; honored for a noble heart as well as for gifts of speech, and worthy to be the parent of such a son as Wendell.

Sally Walley, the mother, the daughter of a wealthy merchant, well-educated and of strong nature, soon perceived the unusual talents of her son. Her earliest gift to him was a Bible, which was one of his most prized treasures for seventy years.

Affectionate and domestic by nature, "Wendell's love for his mother was a passion," says the Rev. Carlos Martyn, in his life of Phillips. Her advice to him always was, "Be good and do good; this is my whole desire for you." From her he learned his Bible and the catechism; and years after, when he stood like a great oak in the forest, beat upon by wind and storm, he never forgot to keep his trust where his mother first taught him to place it.

From her knowledge and common sense in political and mercantile affairs, he judged that other women must be able to take part in the world's work, and therefore through life he asked for them an equal place in home and state.

When a child he enjoyed tools, and would have made a good carpenter or engineer. As his ancestors were mostly preachers—he was descended from the Rev. George Phillips, who came from Great Britain in 1630, and was settled at Watertown, Mass., for fourteen years, till his death—Wendell seemed inclined to follow in their footsteps; for when he was four or five years old, he would put a Bible in the chair before him, and arranging other chairs in a circle, would address them by the hour.

"Wendell," said his father, "don't you get tired of this?"

"No," said the boy, "I don't get tired, but it's rather hard on the chairs!"

His most intimate playmate was J. Lothrop Motley, afterward the celebrated historian. Often, in the Motley garret, they dressed themselves in fancy costume, and declaimed poetry and dialogue; a good preparation for the after years.

At eleven years of age Wendell was sent to the Boston Latin School, then on School Street, where the Parker House now stands. Here he met and became the warm friend of the studious Charles Sumner.

While noted for his love of books and power in declamation, he was also fond of sports,—boating, horseback-riding, and all gymnastic exercises. He was tall, graceful, and handsome.

In 1827, when he was sixteen, he entered Harvard College, whose buildings, noble trees, and shaded walks have become dear to thousands, and will be through all time. The widowed mother—John Phillips had been dead four years—gave her promising boy her blessing, and sent him out into the world to make a man of himself by virtuous and noble living, or to spoil himself by yielding to temptation, as he should elect. He chose the former course.

He became the intimate friend of Edmund Quincy, the son of the president of the college, Josiah Quincy. He stood high in his classes, besides reading extensively in general history and mechanics. He was also greatly interested in genealogy.

Sir Walter Raleigh, Sir Harry Vane, Oliver Cromwell, Lady Mary Wortley Montague, and James Watt were among his English heroes, and Benjamin Franklin, Samuel Adams, and Eli Whitney among his American. Scott and Victor Hugo were great favorites. Elizabeth Barrett Browning he regarded as the first of modern poets. Through life he was an omniverous reader of newspapers.

He was versed in several languages,—German, Italian, and Spanish, but French was his favorite among the modern tongues. He was always skilled in Latin.

Already his life had become more serious through the preaching of Dr. Lyman Beecher. The Rev. Dr. O. P. Gifford relates that Phillips once told a friend that he asked God "that whenever a thing be wrong it may have no power of temptation over me; whenever a thing be right, it may take no courage to do it. From that day to this it has been so. Whenever I have known a thing to be wrong, it has held no temptation. Whenever I have known a thing to be right, it has taken no courage to do it."

The Rev. Dr. Edgar Buckingham, secretary of the class of 1831, says: "I remember well his appearance of devoutness during morning and evening prayers in the chapel, which many attended only to save their credit with the authorities. Doddridge's 'Expositor' Wendell bore to college in his Freshman year (a present, I think, from his mother, a new volume), to be his help in daily thought and prayer."

Another of his classmates says: "Before entering college he had been the subject of religious revival. Previous to that he used to give way to violent outbursts of temper, and his schoolmates would sometimes amuse themselves by deliberately working him into a passion. But after his conversion they could never succeed in getting him out of temper."

"He had a deep love for all that was true and honorable," said his room-mate, the Rev. John Tappan Pierce of Illinois, "always detested a mean action. His Bible was always open on the centre-table. His character was perfectly transparent; there were no subterfuges, no pretences about him. He was known by all to be just what he seemed.... As an orator, Phillips took the highest stand of any graduate of our day. I never knew him to fail in anything or hesitate in a recitation."

Dr. Buckingham speaks of his "kindly, generous manner, his brightness of mind, his perfect purity and whiteness of soul; ... with a most attractive face, 'a smile that was a benediction,' with manners of superior elegance, with conversation filled with the charms of literature, with biography and history, full of refined pleasantry, ... it was no wonder that his society was courted and respected by those who had wealth at their command, and still more by those young men who came from the South."

He was a member of the "Phi Beta Kappa," on account of his scholarship, and president of the exclusive "Porcellian" and "Hasty-Pudding Club."

After graduation Phillips entered the Harvard Law School, under the brilliant Judge Story, and was admitted to the bar when he was twenty-three.

His first honor, after leaving the law school, was the invitation to deliver a Fourth of July address at New Bedford.

Charles T. Congdon, the well-known journalist, says: "When Phillips stood up in the pulpit, I thought him the handsomest man I had ever seen. When he began to speak, his elocution seemed the most perfect to which I had ever listened.... He was speaking of the political history of the State, and of its frequent isolation in politics, and electrified us all by exclaiming, 'The star of Massachusetts has shone the brighter for shining alone!'" How little he foreknew his own isolation and the brightness of the star which shone almost alone for so many years!

He opened an office on Court Street, Boston, and began regular work, knowing that idleness brings no fame. He drew up legal papers, wills, etc., and, as he told a friend, during "those two opening years I paid all my expenses, and few do it now."

On the afternoon of Oct. 21, 1835, sitting beside an open window on Court Street, he saw a noisy crowd on Washington Street; and curiosity prompted him to put on his hat, and learn the reason of the commotion. He found a mob of four or five thousand men trying to force their way into the office of the Anti-Slavery Society, No. 46 Washington Street, where the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society was holding its meeting. Warning handbills had been circulated about the city, and threats had been heard concerning the women if they attempted to assemble; yet nobody really believed that, in a rich and cultivated city, a company of thirty women would be mobbed on account of free speech. It had not then become apparent that the North was bound hand and foot by the slave-power.

While the women prayed, the "broadcloth" mob, of well-dressed men, in large part "gentlemen of property and standing," were yelling and cursing outside. Mayor Lyman appeared on the scene, and commanded the women to disperse, as he was powerless to protect them from bloodshed. He besought the mob to lay down their arms; but they pushed their way into the hall, appropriated the Testaments and Prayer-books, and then began to search for William Lloyd Garrison, who was in an adjoining room. He escaped across a roof, by the advice of the Mayor, but was caught by the mob, who coiled a rope around his body, and dragged him, bare-headed, and with torn garments, into State Street, toward the City Hall, shouting, "Kill him!" "Hang the Abolitionist!"

He was taken to the Mayor's room, provided with needful clothing, thrust into a closed carriage, and driven rapidly to jail, "as a disturber of the peace," but in reality to save his life. The mob clung to the wheels, dashed open the doors, seized the horses, and tried to upset the carriage; but the driver laid his whip on horses and heads of rioters alike, and Garrison was finally safely locked in a cell.

Wendell Phillips looked on bewildered, and seeing, near by, the colonel of his own Suffolk regiment, in which he also was an officer, said, "Why does not the Mayor call out the regiment? We would cheerfully take arms in such a case as this."

The reply was, "Don't you see that the regiment is in the mob?"

The young lawyer went back to his office sadly and thoughtfully.

He said, twenty years later, before the anti-slavery meeting on the anniversary of this mob: "Let me thank the women who came here twenty years ago, some of whom are met here to-day, for the good they have done me. I thank them for all they have taught me. I had read Greek and Roman and English history; I had by heart the classic eulogies of brave old men and martyrs; I dreamed, in my folly, that I heard the same tone in my youth from the cuckoo lips of Edward Everett;—these women taught me my mistake. They taught me that down in those hearts, which loved a principle for itself, asked no man's leave to think or speak, true to their convictions, no matter at what hazard, flowed the real blood of '76, of 1640, of the hemlock-drinker of Athens, and of the martyr-saints of Jerusalem. I thank them for it!"

The year after the Garrison mobbing scene, Phillips began to take part in the lyceum lectures, which at that time were popular, as the University Extension lectures are now. He spoke usually upon some topic in natural science, being more fond of this evidently than of the law.

The colored people were refused admittance to lectures; and this fact so incensed Emerson, Sumner, George William Curtis, and Phillips, that they refused to speak where the negroes were not admitted. This refusal soon broke the exclusive and unnatural custom.

In this year, 1836, Phillips met a young lady two years younger than himself, Ann Terry Greene, the daughter of a wealthy Boston merchant. Her cousin, Miss Grew, was to go by stage-coach with her intended husband to Greenfield, Mass., and Miss Greene was to accompany them. Phillips was asked to join the party. The brilliant young woman, as she herself said, "talked abolition to him all the way up." Mr. Phillips was never a great talker, but a good listener. He said, "I learn something from every one."

Both parents were dead; and she had been received as a daughter into the home of her uncle and aunt, Mr. and Mrs. Henry G. Chapman, who lived in Chauncy Place, near Summer Street. Both were warm friends of Garrison, and deeply interested in the anti-slavery movement. The young girl, with all the enthusiasm of youth, and the impulse of a strong and noble nature, espoused the cause of the slave, and was not afraid to stand for the right in a choice so unpopular among the rich and aristocratic.

The acquaintance begun on the stage-coach resulted in an engagement the same year; and the following year, Oct. 12, 1837, they were married. Like Mrs. Browning, Miss Greene was an invalid at the time of her marriage, and remained thus all her life.

"Of Mr. Phillips's unbounded admiration and love for his wife," writes Francis Jackson Garrison in his memorial sketch of "Ann Phillips," "of his chivalrous devotion to her, and absolute self-abnegation through the more than forty-six years of their married life, and of his oft-confessed indebtedness to her for her wise counsel and inspiration, matchless courage, and unswerving constancy, the world knows in a general way; but only those who have been intimately acquainted with them both can fully realize and appreciate it all. They also know how ardent was her affection for him, and how great her pride in his labors and achievements."

When his speeches were first published in book form, in 1863, he wrote on the title-page of one volume, and gave it to his wife, "Speeches and Lectures. By Ann Phillips." Thus thoroughly did he appreciate her helpfulness.

Mrs. Phillips wrote to a friend regarding her husband, whom she called her "better three-quarters," "When I first met Wendell, I used to think, 'It can never come to pass; such a being as he is could never think of me.' I looked upon it as something as strange as a fairy-tale."

A month after her marriage, she wrote a friend, Nov. 19, 1837: "Only last year, on my sick-bed, I thought I should never see another birthday, and I must go and leave him in the infancy of our love, in the dawn of my new life; and how does to-day find me? the blessed and happy wife of one I thought I should never perhaps live to see. Thanks be to God for all his goodness to us, and may he make me more worthy of my Wendell! I cannot help thinking how little I have acquired, and Wendell, only two years older, seems to know a world more."

And yet, with all this depreciation of self, she had such a fine mind and sound judgment that Phillips deferred to her constantly, talked over with her the arguments of his speeches, and valued her approval more than that of all the world beside. As in the case of John Stuart Mill and his wife, intellectual companionship seemed the basis of their extremely happy married life.

Four years later they moved into a modest brick house, 26 Essex Street, given to Mrs. Phillips by her father, where they lived for forty years. From here Mrs. Phillips writes to a friend concerning herself: "Now what do you think her life is? Why, she strolls out a few steps occasionally, calling it a walk; the rest of the time from bed to sofa, from sofa to rocking-chair; reads generally the Standard and Liberator, and that is pretty much all the literature her aching head will allow her to peruse; rarely writes a letter, sees no company, makes no calls, looks forward to spring and birds, when she will be a little freer.... I am not well enough even to have friends to tea, so that all I strive to do is to keep the house neat and keep myself about. I have attended no meetings since I helped fill 'the negro pew.' What anti-slavery news I get, I get second-hand. I should not get along at all, so great is my darkness, were it not for Wendell to tell me that the world is still going.... We are very happy, and only have to regret my health being so poor, and our own sinfulness. Dear Wendell speaks whenever he can leave me, and for his sake I sometimes wish I were myself again; but I dare say it is all right as it is."

In 1846 Mrs. Phillips writes: "Dear Wendell has met with a sad affliction this fall in the death of his mother.... She was everything to him—indeed, to all her children; a devoted mother and uncommon woman.... So poor unworthy I am more of a treasure to Wendell than ever, and a pretty frail one. For his sake I should love to live; for my own part I am tired, not of life, but of a sick one. I meet with but little sympathy; for these long cases are looked upon as half, if not wholly, make-believes,—as if playing well would not be far better than playing sick."

On the same sheet of paper Mr. Phillips writes: "Dear Ann has spoken of my dear mother's death. My good, noble, dear mother! We differed utterly on the matter of slavery, and she grieved a good deal over what she thought a waste of my time, and a sad disappointment to her; but still I am always best satisfied with myself when I fancy I can see anything in me which reminds me of my mother. She lived in her children, and they almost lived in her, and the world is a different one, now she is gone!"

Nearly a dozen years later Mr. Phillips writes to a friend: "We are this summer at Milton, one of the most delightful of our country towns, about ten miles from Boston. Ann's brother has a place here, and we are with him. She is as usual—little sleep, very weak, never goes down-stairs, in most excellent and cheerful spirits, interested keenly in all good things, and, I sometimes tell her, so much my motive and prompter to every good thing, that I fear, should I lose her, there'd be nothing of me left worth your loving."

After they had been married thirteen years, having no children of their own, Mr. and Mrs. Phillips took into their home, as a daughter, Phoebe Garnaut, twelve years old, the daughter of the lovely Eliza Garnaut, who had died of cholera the year before, through her unselfish devotion to others. This child remained to brighten the Phillips' home for ten years, when she married Mr. George Washburn Smalley, the London correspondent of the New York Tribune, and made her home abroad.

Dr. Buckingham says truly that Wendell Phillips "was a lover all his life,—not with the instinctive love of youth alone, but with the secured attachment, the quiet confidence of the heart, the beautiful affectionateness, which, in the later years of the pure and good, is a far superior development of character, and a far richer enjoyment, than the effervescence of youthful days. She was, as he wrote me once, his counsel, his guide, his inspiration."

As long as Mr. Phillips lived, whenever he was at home, he visited the markets daily, searching for things which should tempt the appetite of "Ann." Lovely flowers were in her windows from one year's end to the other, placed there by his thoughtfulness or that of other dear friends. Fond of music, he daily left her money for the hand-organs played beneath her window. Her love, her cheer, her enthusiastic devotion to the great causes which he pleaded with inimitable grace and power, more than paid him for all his care and self-sacrifice.

Two months after their marriage came the event which made him, like Byron, "awake to find himself famous."

On Nov. 7, 1837, the Rev. Elijah P. Lovejoy was murdered by a pro-slavery mob in Alton, Ill. He was a Presbyterian clergyman from Maine, a graduate of Waterville College. Going West, he became the editor of the St. Louis Observer, a weekly religious paper of his own denomination.

A negro having been chained to a tree and burned to death for killing an officer who attempted to arrest him, the judge decided in favor of the mob. Rev. Mr. Lovejoy protested against such barbarity, and his printing-office was at once destroyed by the lawless. He moved his paper to Alton, Ill., but the slavery sympathizers destroyed his press. Some citizens reimbursed him for the loss. Another press was purchased and destroyed, and then another. The fourth press, the mayor and law-abiding citizens determined should be defended.

In the evening a mob gathered from the saloons,—their usual place of starting,—and threatened to burn the building where it was stored. The officials seemed powerless, the building was fired, and the Rev. Mr. Lovejoy received three balls in his breast.

The death of this young minister in a free State sent a thrill of indignation throughout the North. Dr. William Ellery Channing and one hundred others called a meeting at Faneuil Hall, Boston, for the morning of Dec. 8.

The Hon. Jonathan Phillips, a relative of Wendell Phillips, presided over the crowded assemblage. Dr. Channing spoke eloquently. Soon in the gallery, James T. Austin, the Attorney-General of Massachusetts, a prominent lawyer, and member of Dr. Channing's congregation, arose and declared that Lovejoy "died as the fool dieth," and compared his murderers to the men who destroyed the tea in Boston harbor. The audience was intensely excited.

Young Phillips, twenty-six years old and comparatively unknown, standing among the people,—there are no seats in the hall,—said to his neighbor, "Such a speech in Faneuil Hall must be answered in Faneuil Hall."

"Why not answer it yourself?" whispered the man.

"Help me to the platform and I will," was the reply; and pushing his way through the turbulent crowd he reached the rostrum.

He began with all the grace and self-control which characterized him in after years. There were mingled cries of, "Question," "Hear him," "Go on," "No gagging," and the like.

"Riding the whirlwind undismayed," says George William Curtis, in his eulogy, "he stood upon the platform in all the beauty and grace of imperial youth—the Greeks would have said a god descended—and in words that touched the mind and heart and conscience of that vast multitude, as with fire from heaven, recalling Boston to herself, he saved his native city and her cradle of liberty from the damning disgrace of stoning the first martyr in the great struggle for personal freedom."

"Mr. Chairman," he said, "when I heard the gentleman lay down principles which place the murderers of Alton side by side with Otis and Hancock, with Quincy and Adams, I thought those pictured lips (pointing to the portraits on the wall) would have broken into voice to rebuke the recreant American—the slanderer of the dead.... Sir, for the sentiments he has uttered, on soil consecrated by the prayers of Puritans and the blood of patriots, the earth should have yawned and swallowed him up."

This was received with applause and hisses, with cries of, "Make him take back 'recreant.' He sha'n't go on till he takes it back."

As soon as he could proceed he said, "Fellow-citizens, I cannot take back my words. Surely the Attorney-General, so long and well-known here, needs not the aid of your hisses against one so young as I am,—my voice never before heard within these walls!"

"In the annals of American speech," says Curtis, "there had been no such scene since Patrick Henry's electrical warning to George the Third.... Three such scenes are illustrious in our history. That of the speech of Patrick Henry at Williamsburg, of Wendell Phillips in Faneuil Hall, and of Abraham Lincoln in Gettysburg—three, and there is no fourth."

From this time Wendell Phillips was famous; but, save for the approbation of his young wife, he stood nearly alone. He had already spoken once before an Anti-Slavery Convention at Lynn, Mass. He was now a despised abolitionist. His family were disappointed, his college was surprised, his law constituency well-nigh disappeared. He was socially ostracized.

James Russell Lowell, who also knew what it cost to be on the unpopular side, spoke thus nobly of Phillips:

Mr. Phillips turned his time and thought more than ever to the lecture platform, because in this way he could mould public opinion. He began to deliver "The Lost Arts," in 1838, which gives a glimpse of early civilization in glass-making, in gems, colors, metals, canals, etc., and gave it over two thousand times during the next forty-five years, receiving for it, Dr. Martyn says, which statement he heard from Phillips's own lips, a net result of $150,000.

When asked to lecture he would state his price if he were to speak on science or biography, of which he was especially fond, but would make no charges and pay his own expenses if he might speak on slavery or temperance. If he spoke once he was sure to be sought again, and sooner or later the people heard concerning the subjects to which he had dedicated his life.

Having been made the general agent of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, Phillips organized a strong lecture force, and made every schoolhouse and church where he was allowed to enter the centre for discussions. Mrs. Phillips's health seeming to fail more and more, it was deemed wise to cross the ocean for her sake. They accordingly sailed from New York for London, June 6, 1839, arriving in July. They visited France, Italy, and Germany, and remained abroad two years, without, however, any improvement for the invalid wife.

On June 12, 1840, a World's Anti-Slavery Convention began its sessions in London. A call had been issued, addressed to the "Friends of the slave of every nation and of every clime." American societies sent delegates, Wendell Phillips and his wife, already abroad, Lucretia Mott, the distinguished Quaker, Garrison, and many others.

When they reached England, the women were refused as delegates. They asked Wendell Phillips to plead their cause. When he left the house in London to do so, his wife said to him, "Wendell, don't shilly-shally."

He spoke with his usual politeness and power: "It is the custom there [America] not to admit colored men into respectable society; and we have been told again and again that we are outraging the decencies of humanity when we permit colored men to sit by our side. When we have submitted to brickbats and the tar-tub and feathers in America, rather than yield to the custom prevalent there of not admitting colored brethren into our friendship, shall we yield to parallel custom or prejudice against women in Old England?

"We cannot yield this question if we would, for it is a matter of conscience, ... and British virtue ought not to ask us to yield."

The women were not admitted, however, and were obliged to sit in the gallery as spectators. None the less the women of both nations owe Phillips hearty thanks for his appreciation and his justice. Father Mathew, the great temperance leader of Ireland, deeply regretted the exclusion of the women delegates.

After the convention, Phillips and his wife went, by way of Belgium and the Rhine, to Kissingen, in Bavaria. He writes to a friend in England: "To Americans it was especially pleasant to see at Frankfort the oldest printed Bible in the world, and two pairs of Luther's shoes, which Ann would not quit sight of till I had mustered German enough to ask the man to let the 'little girl' feel of them."

Again he writes: "We started for Florence, by Bologna, that jewel of a city; ... for she admits women to be professors in her university, her gallery guards their paintings, her palaces boast their sculptures. I gloried in standing beside a woman-professor's monument, set up side by side with that of the illustrious Galvani."

To Garrison he writes from Naples, having then the same sympathy for the poor and the laborer which he showed through life: "When you meet in the same street a man encompassed with all the equipage of wealth, and the beggar, on whose brow disease and starvation have written his title to your pity, the question is, involuntarily, Is this a Christian city? To my mind the answer is, No....

"I hope the discussion of the question of property will not cease until the Church is convinced that, from Christian lips ownership means responsibility for the right use of what God has given; that the title of a needy brother is as sacred as the owner's own, and infringed upon, too, whenever that owner allows the siren voice of his own tastes to drown the cry of another's necessities.... None know what it is to live till they redeem life from monotony by sacrifice."

After the return of the Phillipses, the anti-slavery work was taken up more vigorously than ever. Colored children were not allowed to study in the schools with white in Boston. Phillips agitated till separate colored schools were abolished. He appealed to the Legislature of his native State to compel railroads, as common carriers, to admit the negro to the cars, and finally was successful.

He shared, like Henry Ward Beecher and Lucretia Mott, the discomforts of the colored man. Frederick Douglass said, in his oration on Phillips, given before his own race, in Washington, 1884: "On one occasion, after delivering a lecture to the New Bedford Lyceum, before a highly cultivated audience, when brought to the railroad station (as I was not allowed to travel in a first-class car, but was compelled to ride in a filthy box called the 'Jim Crow' car), he stepped to my side, in the presence of his aristocratic friends, and walked with me straight into this miserable dog-car, saying, 'Douglass, if you cannot ride with me, I can ride with you.'

"On the Sound, between New York and Newport, in those dark days, a colored passenger was not allowed abaft the wheels of the steamer, and had to spend the night on the forward deck, with horses, sheep, and swine. On such trips, when I was a passenger, Wendell Phillips preferred to walk the naked deck with me to taking a state-room. I could not persuade him to leave me to bear the burden of insult and outrage alone."

In 1850 the "irrepressible conflict" between freedom and slavery was reaching its climax. The Fugitive-Slave Law, fathered by Henry Clay, and, to the dismay of a large portion of the North, upheld by Daniel Webster in his 7th of March speech, had been signed by the President, Millard Fillmore, Sept. 18, 1850. This bill made slave-hunting and the return of slaves to their masters a duty.

A great company, presided over by Charles Francis Adams, and addressed by Phillips and others, in Faneuil Hall, protested; but the North was powerless or suppliant. Mobs broke up anti-slavery meetings in New York City. Colored men, on one pretext or another, were seized and carried back to slavery.

On April 3, 1851, Thomas Sims, a slave, was arrested in Boston, and, after a hurried examination before the United States Commissioner, was given up to his pursuers. The poor slave youth begged this favor: "Give me a knife," he said, "and when the commissioner declares me a slave, I will stab myself to the heart, and die before his eyes."

At midnight the Mayor of Boston, with two or three hundred policemen, heavily armed, placed Sims on board the ship Acorn, and sent him back into bondage.

Great meetings were held on Boston Common and in Tremont Temple to protest against this action, but they were of no avail. A year later, on the anniversary of the rendition of Sims, Phillips gave a thrilling address at the Melodeon. Looking towards the future, he said, "I know what civil war is.... And yet I do not know that, to an enlightened mind, a scene of civil war is any more sickening than the thought of a hundred and fifty years of slavery. Take the broken hearts, the bereaved mothers, the infant wrung from the hands of its parents, the husband and wife torn asunder, every right trodden under foot, the blighted hopes, the imbruted souls, the darkened and degraded millions, sunk below the level of intellectual life, melted in sensuality, herded with beasts, who have walked over the burning marl of Southern slavery to their graves, and where is the battle-field, however ghastly, that is not white—white as an angel's wing—compared with the blackness of that darkness which has brooded over the Carolinas for two hundred years?"

Meantime, what had become of Sims? On arriving at Savannah he was severely whipped, and confined in a cell for two months. He was then sent to a slave-market at Charleston, and thence to another market at New Orleans. Finally he was purchased by a brick-mason, taken to Vicksburg, and in 1863 he escaped to the besieging army of Grant, and was given transportation to the North.

Three years later, May 14, 1854, Anthony Burns, a slave, was arrested, and on June 2, marched through Court Street and State Street, over the ground where Crispus Attucks, a colored man, fell as the first victim in the Boston Massacre in the Revolution, to the wharf, in the centre of a concourse of people, guarded by companies of militia and protected by cannon. The streets were draped in black by the indignant citizens, and the bells tolled a dirge, as the bound slave was thrust into the hold of a vessel ready to start for Virginia. Burns was the last black man carried back to his masters from Massachusetts.

Meantime, Wendell Phillips had been fighting other battles. In October, 1850, the first National Woman Suffrage Convention was held at Worcester, Mass. Nine States responded. Phillips spoke earnestly, but no full report of his address or of others was taken.

The next year, 1851, at Worcester, he made a brilliant speech at the second National Woman Suffrage Convention. Of that speech, given in full in Mr. Phillips's "Speeches and Lectures" published in 1863, Mr. Curtis says, in his eulogy of Phillips: "In his general statement of principle nothing has been added to that discourse; in vivid and effective eloquence of advocacy it has never been surpassed."

"What we ask is simply this," said Phillips, "what all other classes have asked before: Leave it to woman to choose for herself her profession, her education, and her sphere. We deny to any portion of the species the right to prescribe to any other portion its sphere, its education, or its rights.... The sphere of each man, of each woman, of each individual, is that sphere which he can, with the highest exercise of his powers, perfectly fill. The highest act which the human being can do, that is the act which God designed him to do.... The tools, now, to him or her who can use them....

"While woman is admitted to the gallows, the jail, and the tax-list, we have no right to debar her from the ballot-box."

He had no fears that woman's natural grace or tenderness would be marred by depositing her vote in the ballot-box. "Let education," he said, "form the rational and moral being, and nature will take care of the woman."

On another occasion Mr. Phillips gave this illustration: "Goethe said, that, 'if you plant an oak in a flower-pot, one of two things was sure to happen,—either the oak will be dwarfed, or the flower-pot will break.' So we have planted woman in a flower-pot, hemmed her in by restrictions; and, when we move to enlarge her sphere, society cries out, 'Oh, you'll break the flower-pot!' Well, I say, let it break. Man made it, and the sooner it goes to pieces the better. Let us see how broadly the branches will throw themselves, and how beautiful will be the shape, and how glorious against the moonlit sky or glowing sunset the foliage shall appear!"

He thought the idea that woman would have no time for political matters an absurdity, when the soldier, the busy manufacturer, the lawyer, the president of a college, and the artisan have time to vote.

"Responsibility," he said, "is one instrument—a great instrument—of education, both moral and intellectual. It sharpens the faculties. It unfolds the moral nature. It makes the careless prudent, and turns recklessness into sobriety.... Woman can never study those great questions that interest and stir most deeply the human mind, until she studies them under the mingled stimulus and check of this responsibility.... The great school of this people is the jury-box and the ballot-box.... Great political questions stir the deepest nature of one-half the nation; but they pass far above and over the heads of the other half. Yet, meanwhile, theorists wonder that the first have their whole nature unfolded, and the others will persevere in being dwarfed."

In 1861, in Cooper Institute, New York, Mr. Phillips said: "Let public opinion only grant that, like their thousand brothers, those women may go out, and, wherever they find work to do, do it without a stigma being set upon them. Let the educated girl of twenty have the same liberty to use the pen, to practise law, to write books, to serve in a library, to tend in a gallery of art, to do anything that her brother can do." And he asked for woman equal wages with man for the same work.

The anti-slavery war was still waging. The Kansas and Nebraska Act, by which the people were left to fight out the battle of slavery or freedom on their own soil, resulted, as might have been expected, in bloodshed. Among those who went to Kansas, determined to help make it a free State, was John Brown, whose pathetic life has been written recently by that eminent anti-slavery worker and author, Frank B. Sanborn, Esq., of Concord, Mass.

During those dreadful years of civil war in Kansas, Brown and his family suffered all manner of hardships. Some of his sons were in prison, and some murdered. He had always wished to free the slaves, had helped many to escape, and in 1859 carried out a plan, long in his mind, to establish a station in Virginia, near enough to a free State, where fugitive slaves could defend themselves for a time, till they could be helped into Canada.

On Sunday evening, Oct. 16, 1859, Brown, with eighteen men, arrived at Harper's Ferry, broke down the armory-gate, and took possession of the village, without firing a gun. The citizens soon armed, several men were killed, and, before the next night, Brown and his company, now reduced to six, were barricaded in the engine-house. Colonel Robert E. Lee, afterwards the Confederate general, arrived with some United States marines from Washington, and Brown was ordered to surrender, which he refused to do. When he was finally captured, his two sons were dead, and he was thought to be dying from his wounds.

He met his death bravely on the scaffold at Charlestown, Va., Dec. 2. 1859.

He wrote a friend, a short time before his death, "I think I cannot better serve the cause I love so much than to die for it; and in my death I may do more than in my life."

The day he died, he wrote on a piece of paper and handed it to one of the guards, "I, John Brown, am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but with blood. I had, as I now think vainly, flattered myself that without very much bloodshed it might be done."

As he rode on the wagon to the scaffold, at eleven o'clock, looking out over the two thousand Virginian soldiers, the distant hills, and the Blue Ridge Mountains, he said, "This is a beautiful country; I have not cast my eyes over it before—that is, in this direction." He thanked his jailer for his kindness, and said, "I am ready at any time—do not keep me waiting;" and died without a tremor.

Victor Hugo said, "His hangman is the whole American Republic.... What the South slew last December was not John Brown, but slavery."

Brown's body was delivered to his wife, and she bore it to New York. Wendell Phillips met the funeral company at that city, and they carried the body to North Elba, in the Adirondack Mountains. He was buried Dec. 8, 1859, Mr. Phillips speaking eloquently and touchingly at the grave. "He has abolished slavery in Virginia," said Phillips.... "History will date Virginia emancipation from Harper's Ferry. True, the slave is still there. So, when the tempest uproots a pine on yon hill, it looks green for months—a year or two. Still, it is timber, not a tree. John Brown has loosened the roots of the slave system; it only breathes,—it does not live,—hereafter."

How strange it was that only a few short months afterward thousands of Union soldiers were marching to battle, singing that inspiring strain,—

While Brown lay in prison at Charlestown, Va., a meeting was held in Tremont Temple, Boston, to raise money for his impoverished family. John A. Andrew, not then governor, presided. Emerson, Phillips, and the Rev. J. M. Manning, Congregationalist, of the "Old South" Church, made earnest addresses. The latter said, "I am here to represent the church of Sam Adams and Wendell Phillips; and I want all the world to know that I am not afraid to ride in the coach when Wendell Phillips sits on the box."

In New York a meeting for the same purpose was confronted by a fierce mob. On Staten Island, when Phillips attempted to lecture, George William Curtis presiding, a mob gathered on the road and sidewalk. A lady driving up, a man from West Brighton rushed to the carriage-door, followed by several rough men, and exclaimed, "I advise you, madam, not to go in; there is going to be trouble."

"What trouble, sir?" said she calmly.

"Two hundred of us," said the leader, "have sworn to tear this man from the desk and plant him in the Jersey marshes."

"I don't think that will be allowed, sir," she replied.

"Well, if you have force enough to prevent it, go ahead."

"I do not say any such thing," she answered; "but this is not a political meeting. I have come to hear a literary lecture, and I think there will be decent men enough here to check any disturbance."

The bravery of the woman seemed to abash the crowd. Though some climbed on ladders to the windows of the church and shouted, "Fetch him out!" they did not attempt to batter down the doors. They threw stones and cursed after the lecture was over, but Phillips was not harmed.

An attempt was made to mob him in Philadelphia. He wrote to his wife's cousin, Miss Grew, "I have become so notorious, that at Albany, Kingston, and Hartford the Lyceum could not obtain a church for me; and the papers riddled me with pellets for a week; but that saved advertising, and got me larger houses gratis. At Troy they even thought of imitating Staten Island, and getting up a homoeopathic mob, but couldn't."

Phillips was becoming accustomed to mobs. He had, says Mr. Higginson, "a careless, buoyant, almost patrician air, as if nothing in the way of mob-violence were worth considering." Dec. 2, 1860, on the anniversary of John Brown's execution, being debarred from speaking in Tremont Temple, a crowded meeting was held in the Belknap-street colored church. The mob determined to get him into their hands, says Charles W. Slack, in George Lowell Austin's life of Phillips, and were only prevented "by a cordon of young men, about forty or more in number, who with locked arms and closely compacted bodies, had Phillips in the centre of their circle, and were safely bearing him home."

On Jan. 24, 1861, the annual meeting of the Massachusetts Anti-slavery Society was held in Tremont Temple. Mrs. Lydia Maria Child describes the scene: "Soon the mob began to yell from the galleries. They came tumbling in by hundreds.... Such yelling, screeching, and bellowing I never heard....

"Mr. Phillips stood on the front of the platform for a full hour, trying to be heard whenever the storm lulled a little. They cried, 'Throw him out! Throw a brickbat at him! Your house is afire; go put out your house!' Then they'd sing, with various bellowing and shrieking accompaniments, 'Tell John Andrew, tell John Andrew, John Brown's dead!' I should think there were four or five hundred of them. At one time they all rose up, many of them clattered down-stairs, and there was a surging forward toward the platform. My heart beat so fast I could hear it; for I did not then know how Mr. Phillips's armed friends were stationed at every door, and in the middle of the aisle. At last it was announced that the police were coming. Mr. Phillips tried to speak, but his voice was again drowned. Then ... he stepped forward and addressed his speech to the reporters stationed directly below him."

He said to the reporters—the noisy crowd shouted, "Speak louder! We want to hear what you're saying!"—"While I speak to these pencils, I speak to a million of men. What, then, are these boys? We have got the press of the country in our hands.... My voice is beaten by theirs, but they cannot beat types. All hail and glory to Faust, who invented printing, for he made mobs impossible." Nothing seemed to fire the great orator like opposition. He was the very soul of courage.

The Civil War had begun. Phillips, who had been in favor of disunion, because he and other anti-slavery men and women wished no union with slavery, now that the first shot had been fired on April 12, 1861, became a firm supporter of the Union.

He said in his lecture "Under the Flag," delivered in Music Hall, April 21, 1861, and contained in the first volume of his speeches: "The cannon shot against Fort Sumter has opened the only door out of this hour. There were but two. One was compromise; the other was battle.... The South opened this with cannon shot, and Lincoln shows himself at the door. The war, then, is not aggressive, but in self-defence, and Washington has become the ThermopylÆ of liberty and justice. Rather than surrender that capital, cover every square foot of it with a living body; crowd it with a million of men, and empty every bank vault at the North to pay the cost. Teach the world once for all, that North America belongs to the Stars and Stripes, and under them no man shall wear a chain."

The speech was reported for the Boston Journal; but fearing that the war Democrats would not be pleased, it was suppressed. The friends of Phillips, learning of this, had it printed as an extra, and scattered one hundred thousand copies of it.

Through these early years of the war Phillips was urging the arming of the negroes; and when some white men doubted their courage, he lectured through the land upon Toussaint L'Ouverture, the great leader of Hayti, whom he thus pictures:—

"Of Toussaint, Hermona, the Spanish general, who knew him well, said, 'He was the purest soul God ever put into a body.' Of him history bears witness, 'He never broke his word.'"

When he was captured by the French and taken to France, "As the island faded from his sight, he turned to the captain and said, 'You think you have rooted up the tree of liberty, but I am only a branch; I have planted the tree so deep that all France can never root it up.'"

He was thrown into a stone dungeon, twelve feet by twenty. "This dungeon was a tomb. The story is told that, in Josephine's time, a young French marquis was placed there, and the girl to whom he was betrothed went to the Empress and prayed for his release. Said Josephine to her, 'Have a model of it made and bring it to me.' Josephine placed it near Napoleon. He said, 'Take it away, it is horrible!' She put it on his footstool, and he kicked it from him. She held it to him the third time, and said, 'Sire, in this horrible dungeon you have put a man to die.' 'Take him out,' said Napoleon, and the girl saved her lover.

"In this tomb Toussaint was buried, but he did not die fast enough. Finally the commandant was told to go into Switzerland, to carry the keys of the dungeon with him, and to stay four days; when he returned, Toussaint was found starved to death....

"'No RETALIATION,' was his great motto and the rule of his life; and the last words uttered to his son in France were these, 'My boy, you will one day go back to St. Domingo; forget that France murdered your father.'"

Early in 1863 Phillips saw colored troops, the Fifty-fourth and Fifty-fifth Regiments, march through the same street where Garrison had been mobbed and Anthony Burns carried back into slavery by United States troops, singing the John Brown song. Times were indeed changed since Phillips himself was mobbed for suggesting negro soldiers.

When the war was over, and Abraham Lincoln lay dead, Phillips spoke in Tremont Temple to a hushed and mourning company: "What the world would not look at, God has set to-day in a light so ghastly bright that it dazzles us blind. What we would not believe, God has written all over the face of the continent with the sword's point, in the blood of our best and most beloved. We believe the agony of the slave's hovel, the mother, and the husband, when it takes its seat at our own board....

"He was permitted himself to deal the last staggering blow which sent rebellion reeling to its grave; and then, holding his darling boy by the hand, to walk the streets of its surrendered capital, while his ears drank in praise and thanksgiving which bore his name to the throne of God in every form piety and gratitude could invent; and finally to seal the sure triumph of the cause he loved with his own blood. He caught the first notes of the coming jubilee, and heard his own name in every one. Who among living men may not envy him?"

In the great matters of reconstruction and constitutional changes, Phillips took an ardent and helpful part. He criticised sharply, perhaps not always wisely, (for who can be infallible in judgment?) but he was always earnest and unselfish. When asked to let his name be used for Congress, he refused, preferring to hold no party allegiance where principle was at stake.

He constantly urged the ballot for the negro. "Reconstruct no State," he said, "without giving to every loyal man in it the ballot. I scout all limitations of knowledge, property, or race. Universal suffrage for me; that was the Revolutionary model. Every freeman voted, black or white, whether he could read or not. My rule is, any citizen liable to be hanged for crime is entitled to vote for rulers. The ballot insures the school."

When the slavery question was settled, Wendell Phillips could not stop working. He wrote to a meeting of his old abolition comrades, two months before his death, "Let it not be said that the old abolitionist stopped with the negro, and was never able to see that the same principles claimed his utmost effort to protect all labor, white and black, and to further the discussion of every claim of humanity."

He said to a friend, "Now that the field is won, do you sit by the camp-fire, but I will put out into the underbrush."

He had for years been a total abstainer, and now more than ever was an earnest advocate of prohibition. In Tremont Temple, Jan. 24, 1881, he reviewed Dr. Crosby's "Calm view of Temperance."

Phillips stood manfully for the temperance pledge. "We make a pledge by joining a church," he said. "The husband pledges himself to his wife, and she to him, for life. Is the marriage ceremony, then, a curse, a hindrance to virtue and progress?

"Society rests in all its transactions on the idea that a solemn promise, pledge, assertion, strengthens and assures the act.... The witness on the stand gives solemn promise to tell the truth; the officer about to assume place for one year, or ten, or for life, pledges his word and oath; the grantor in a deed binds himself for all time by record; churches, societies, universities, accept funds on pledge to appropriate them to certain purposes and no other.... No man ever denounced these pledges as unmanly.... The doctor's principle would unsettle society; and if one proposed to apply it to any cause but temperance, practical men would quietly put him aside as out of his head."

Phillips told this story concerning the pledge. A man about sixty came to sit beside him as he was travelling in a railway car. He had heard Phillips lecture on temperance the previous evening. "I am master of a ship," said he, "sailing out of New York, and have just returned from my fiftieth voyage across the Atlantic. About thirty years ago I was a sot, shipped, while dead drunk, as one of the crew, and was carried on board like a log. When I came to, the captain sent for me. He asked me, 'Do you remember your mother?' I told him she died before I could remember anything. 'Well,' said he, 'I am a Vermont man. When I was young I was crazy to go to sea. At last my mother consented I should seek my fortune in New York.'

"He told how she stood on one side the garden gate and he on the other, when, with his bundle on his arm, he was ready to walk to the next town. She said to him, 'My boy, I don't know anything about towns, and I never saw the sea; but they tell me those great towns are sinks of wickedness, and make thousands of drunkards. Now, promise me you'll never drink a drop of liquor.'

"He said, 'I laid my hand in hers and promised, as I looked into her eyes for the last time. She died soon after. I've been on every sea, and seen the worst kinds of life and men. They laughed at me as a milksop, and wanted to know if I was a coward; but when they offered me liquor, I saw my mother across the gate, and I never drank a drop. It has been my sheet-anchor. I owe all to that. Would you like to take that pledge?' said he."

He took it. "It has saved me," he said. "I have a fine ship, wife and children at home, and I have helped others."

Dr. Crosby favored license. Phillips said, "The statute books in forty States are filled with the abortions of thousands of license laws that were never executed, and most of them were never intended to be."

"No one supposes," said Phillips later, "that law can make men temperate.... But law can shut up those bars and dram-shops which facilitate and feed intemperance, which double our taxes, make our streets unsafe for men of feeble resolution, treble the peril to property and life, and make the masses tools in the hands of designing men to undermine and cripple law."

Phillips also worked untiringly for labor reform. He wrote to Mr. George J. Holyoake, in England, "There'll never be, I believe and trust, a class-party here, labor against capital, the lines are so indefinite, like dove's-neck colors. Three-fourths of our population are to some extent capitalists; and, again, all see that there is really, and ought always to be, alliance, not struggle, between them." Again he said, "Capital and labor are only the two arms of a pair of scissors,—useless when separate, and only safe when fastened together, cutting everything before them."

He urged fewer hours for labor, better wages, and united effort among workingmen. He said to them, "Why have you not carried your ends before? Because in ignorance and division you have let the other side have their own way. We are ruled by brains.... You want books and journals.... When men have wrongs to complain of they should go to the ballot-box and right them.... Men always lose half of what is gained by violence. What is gained by argument is gained forever."

In an address in 1872 he said to labor, "If you want power in this country, if you want to make yourselves felt, ... write on your banner, so that every political trimmer can read it, so that every politician, no matter how short-sighted he may be, can read it: 'We never forget! If you launch the arrow of sarcasm at labor, we never forget; if there is a division in Congress, and you throw your vote in the wrong scale, we never forget.'"

Mr. Phillips carried out his ideas of labor under his own roof. So kind and considerate was he to his servants, that his cook, who was his nurse in childhood, used to leave the door open into the kitchen, that she might hear him pass and repass. She said, "Bless him, there is more music in his footfall than in a cathedral organ!"

When she was too old for work, he placed her in a home of her own, and went to see her every Saturday, when possible, with many gifts for her comfort, till she died. He paid the best wages to servants of anybody in the neighborhood. "Good pay, good service," he used to say.

He was always generous. One day on the cars he met a woman thinly clad, a lecturer from the South, a niece of Jefferson Davis, as he afterwards learned. She had received five dollars for her work. Mr. Phillips said, "I don't want to give offence, but you know I preach that a woman is entitled to the same as a man if she does the same work. Now, my price is fifty or a hundred dollars; and, if you will let me divide it with you, I shall not have had any more than you, and the thing will be even."

The lady at first refused, but was persuaded to take it. When she reached home she found there were fifty dollars—all he had received for his lecture at Gloucester.

In 1870 Phillips accepted the nomination for the governorship of Massachusetts from the prohibition and the labor parties, though he said, and undoubtedly with truth, that he had no desire to be governor. He received over twenty thousand votes.

When blamed because he favored General Butler for governor, he replied that he did not know a man among all the candidates whom he would make a saint of. "The difficulty is," said he, with his natural love of humor, "saints do not come very often; and, when they do, it is the hardest thing in the world to get them into politics."

When Andrew Johnson was not impeached, as Phillips hoped he would be, he used to say, "Congress has deposed him without impeachment. 'Friend, I'll not shoot thee,' said the Quaker to the footpad, 'but I'll hold thy head in the water until thee drown thyself.' The Republican party has taken a leaf out of that scrupulous Christian's book."

Phillips was a Protectionist. In early life he was a free-trader, but changed his views. "Under free trade," he said, "our country would be wholly agricultural.... Should we lose our diversified occupations, we would suffer a great loss, though there might be a pecuniary gain.... If all the world were under one law, and every man raised to the level of the Sermon on the Mount, free trade would be so easy and charming! But while nations study only how to cripple their enemies,—that is, their neighbors,—and while each trader strives to cheat his customer, and strangle the firm on the other side of the street, we must not expect the millennium."

He smiled at the "shoals of college-boys, slenderly furnished with Greek and Latin, but steeped in marvellous and delightful ignorance of life and public affairs, filling the country with free-trade din."

Phillips pleaded the cause of the Irish in his wonderful lecture on Daniel O'Connell. He was also the friend and advocate of the Indian.

He opposed capital punishment, because he thought the old Testament law—about which scholars disagree—was no more binding upon us than scores of others given to the Jews about "abstaining from meats offered to idols, and from blood and from things strangled," etc. Once men were hanged in England for stealing a shilling. We are gradually learning that reform is what society needs—not revenge.

Mr. Phillips spoke on finance before the American Social Science Association. His plan was, says Austin: "Take from the national banks all right to issue bills; let the nation itself supply a currency ample for all public needs; reduce the rate of interest."

In the summer of 1880 Mr. Phillips and his wife spent some time at Princeton, Mass. He was then sixty-nine years old. He wrote a friend: "I laze and ride on horseback, exploring the drives.... The rest of the time I sleep. I weigh a hundred and seventy-five pounds, and don't feel as old as I am."

To another friend he wrote of the extreme stillness of the place: "A passer-by is an event. The only noise ever made is by the hens. The only thing that ever happens is when we miss the cat. But we always keep awake at the sunsets, they are splendid."

The next year, June 30, 1881, he was asked to give the address at Harvard College, on the Centennial Anniversary of the Phi Beta Kappa. His subject was "The Scholar in a Republic."

"It was," says Thomas Wentworth Higginson, "the tardy recognition of him by his own college and his own literary society, and proved to be, in some respects, the most remarkable effort of his life. He never seemed more at his ease, more colloquial and more extemporaneous; and he held an unwilling audience spellbound, while bating absolutely nothing of his radicalism."

He pleaded for the great reforms for which he had labored all his life. "The fathers," he said, "touched their highest level when, with stout-hearted and serene faith, they trusted God that it was safe to leave men with all the rights he gave them. Let us be worthy of their blood, and save this sheet-anchor of the race,—universal suffrage,—God's church, God's school, God's method of gently binding men into commonwealths in order that they may at last melt into brothers....

"These agitations are the opportunities and the means God offers us to refine the taste, mould the character, lift the purpose, and educate the moral sense of the masses, on whose intelligence and self-respect rests the State. God furnishes these texts. He gathers for us this audience, and only asks of our coward lips to preach the sermons....

"If in this critical battle for universal suffrage ... there be any weapon, which, once taken from the armory, will make victory certain, it will be, as it has been in art, literature, and society, summoning woman into the political arena.... The literary class, until half a dozen years, has taken note of this great uprising only to fling every obstacle in its way.

"The first glimpse we get of Saxon blood in history is that line of Tacitus in his 'Germany,' which reads, 'In all grave matters they consult their women.' Years hence, when robust Saxon sense has flung away Jewish superstition and Eastern prejudice, and put under its foot fastidious scholarship and squeamish fashion, some second Tacitus, from the Valley of the Mississippi, will answer to him of the Seven Hills, 'In all grave questions we consult our women.' ...

"To be as good as our fathers we must be better.... With serene faith they persevered. Let us rise to their level. Crush appetite and prohibit temptation if it rots great cities."

In the winter of 1882 he made his last lecture tour, when he was seventy-one. He had the same noble presence, the same exquisitely toned voice which began his speech as in ordinary conversation, the same calm self-poised manner, as in middle life. The eyes were blue and small, the smile sweet, the figure straight, the whole bearing one of perfect mastery of both self and audience. I have heard, "his attitude was a study for the sculptor—yet unconscious and natural," truly says Mr. Martyn. "The weight of the body was usually supported upon the left foot, with the right slightly advanced at an easy angle—an attitude of combined firmness and repose."

His speeches were never written out. He disliked writing, and thought it "a mild form of slavery—a man chained to an ink-pot." He said, "The chief thing I aim at is to master my subject. Then I earnestly try to get the audience to think as I do."

He once wrote a young man, who had asked him about public speaking: "I think practice with all kinds of audiences the best of teachers. Think out your subject carefully. Read all you can relative to the themes you touch. Fill your mind; and then talk simply and naturally. Forget altogether that you are to make a speech or are making one.... Remember to talk up to an audience, not down to it. The commonest audience can relish the best thing you can say if you say it properly. Be simple, be earnest."

"He faced his audience," says Curtis, "with a tranquil mien, and a beaming aspect that was never dimmed. He spoke, and in the measured cadence of his quiet voice there was intense feeling, but no declamation, no passionate appeal, no superficial and feigned emotion. It was simply colloquy—a gentleman conversing. Unconsciously and surely the ear and heart were charmed.

"How was it done? Ah! how did Mozart do it, how Raphael? The secret of the rose's sweetness, of the bird's ecstasy, of the sunset's glory—that is the secret of genius and of eloquence."

Phillips's habit in travelling was to carry a large shawl, which he always spread between the sheets of his bed in the various hotels, to prevent a cold; an example to other speakers. His supper before an address was usually, it is said, three raw eggs and a cup of tea.

Mr. Phillips had already moved his home from 26 Essex Street, in the spring of 1881, to No. 37 Common Street, not far away, as his home had to be torn down for the widening of the street. It was a severe trial to both, but it did not remain their earthly home for long.

Mr. Phillips made his last public address at the unveiling of Anne Whitney's statue of Harriet Martineau at the "Old South" Church, Boston, Dec. 26, 1883.

His wife was seriously ill through January, and he watched most devotedly by her bedside. On the 26th of the month he was taken ill with angina pectoris. He felt that the end was near. He said, "I have no fear of death. I have long foreseen it. My only regret is for poor Ann. I had hoped to close her eyes before mine were shut." To a friend who spoke to him of his always expressed belief in the divinity of Christ, though many of his friends were Unitarian, he said, quoting the words of an eminent Semitic scholar: "I find the whole history of humanity before him and after him points to him, and finds in him its centre and its solution. His whole conduct, his deeds, his words, have a supernatural character, being altogether inexplicable from human relations and human means. I feel that here there is something more than man."

"Then you have no doubt about a future life?" said the friend.

"I am as sure of it as I am that there will be a to-morrow," was the reply.

On Saturday evening, Feb. 2, 1884, at fifteen minutes past six, he closed his eyes calmly and quietly forever.

All Boston, all America, was moved at the death of the great leader—patrician born, yet the people's advocate. The funeral was held at eleven o'clock Wednesday, Feb. 6, at Hollis-street Church, and then the body was borne to Faneuil Hall, two colored companies forming a guard of honor.

There, where he had won his first fame in youth at the Lovejoy meeting, where he had stirred the whole land by his eloquence in the cause of the oppressed, it was fitting he should sleep at last.

The Irish National League of Boston sent a mound of flowers, three feet by four, with the word "Humanity" in the centre, in violets on a bed of carnations. The Irish-American Societies of Boston sent a harp four feet high of ivy leaves and japonicas, with the word "Ireland" in the centre. One of the harp strings was broken. Others sent a sheaf of ripened wheat, a crown of ivy and roses, and a wreath of laurel.

From one o'clock till four, thousands passed the form of their beloved dead; rich and poor, Irish and American, black and white, children and adults. One old colored woman, with tears flowing down her cheeks, said, "Our Wendell Philips has gone." Another said, "He was de bes' fren' we ever hed. We owes him a heap!"

Frederick Douglass looked on in sorrow. "I wanted to see this throng," he said, "and to see the hold that this man had upon the community. It is a wonderful tribute."

Thousands were unable to enter Faneuil Hall, and filled every available inch of space in the street, and windows and balconies of buildings. A vast crowd followed up State Street to Washington, up School to Tremont, to the old Granary burying-ground, where the body was laid in the family vault.

Mrs. Phillips died Saturday, April 24, 1886, two years after her husband. She had been closely confined to her home for the greater part of fifty years. "She lay as if asleep," says Francis J. Garrison, "with all the purity and guilelessness of her youthful face ripened into maturity. It seemed transfiguration."

The body of Wendell Phillips was carried with that of his wife to Milton, a beautiful suburb where they had often spent their summers; and both were buried in the same grave, side by side, in a lot which he had purchased a year or two before his death. A noble pine-tree stands near the spot. On a plain slab at the head of the grave are the words, "Ann and Wendell Phillips."