At the Quarterly Meeting of the Massachusetts Antislavery Society, held in Lynn, March 28, 1837, the following resolution was offered by Wendell Phillips, Esq., of Boston:--

Resolved, That the exertions of the Hon. John Quincy Adams, and the rest of the Massachusetts Delegation who sustained him, in his defence of the right of petition, deserve the cordial approbation and the gratitude of every American citizen.

This was the first speech of Mr. Phillips, and marked his entrance upon the Antislavery movement. Another speech delivered by him on the same day and occasion will be found in a later volume.

Mr. President: One of the previous resolutions of this meeting refers to the success of the cause of abolition within the last few months, and the bright hopes with which we may enter on another year of labor. The petitions which have loaded the tables of our State and National Legislatures may certainly be considered as one great cause of that success, and the pursuing of the same course, the best ground of hope for the future. Such circumstances naturally fix every eye on that distinguished citizen to whom the resolution refers. His course during the last session deserves the gratitude of every American; for in that contest, he was not the representative of any State or any party, but the champion of the fundamental principles of the Constitution. The right of petition we had thought as firmly fixed in the soil of America as the Saxon race which brought it here. It was the breath of life during our colonial history, and is recognized on every page of our history since as the bulwark of civil liberty. Antiquity and the historical associations of our mother country had rendered it so sacred that we looked confidently to that for protection and redress, when all other means should fail.

Upon the friends of abolition, of free discussion, of equal rights, throughout the land, insult had been heaped on insult, and outrage added to outrage, till we thought that malice had done its worst. All the outworks that guard the citadel of liberty had been in turn overthrown. The dearest rights of freemen had been, one by one, torn from us. We had heard, at a time of profound peace, in the midst of our most crowded cities, the voice of the multitude once and again overwhelm the voice of the laws, almost without the shadow of an attempt at resistance on the part of the civil magistrate. We had seen a price set by a Southern legislature on the head of a citizen of Massachusetts, for presuming to think as he pleased, and to speak what he thought, within the borders of the old Commonwealth; and this insult had been answered only by a recommendation on the part of our own Executive that whoever dared to move the question of slavery should be proceeded against at common law. We had long known that we held our lives and property at the will of the mob; but now, as if by common consent, the North seems ready to yield to Southern threats the right to speak and to think. The time had come when eloquence was to be gagged, and reason to be hoodwinked, We had heard in old Faneuil, and from the lips of those whose very names should have been a guaranty of their attachment to freedom, principles which would have blotted out every page of our past history.

Borne down, but not dismayed,--confident that the hearts of the people, could the truth but reach them, were sound at the core,--we sought out the weapon which our fathers wielded; we besieged the doors of our State legislatures with petitions and remonstrances. I need not tell the county of Essex how that appeal was answered. Of that answer they have already taken note. There was one refuge left,--the government which our fathers established, to promote justice, and secure the blessings of liberty to themselves and their posterity. There, at least, we might hope to find men able to look behind circumstances to principles.

Who does not recollect the astonishment — for the first feeling was rather astonishment than indignation -with which we heard that the door of the capitol was closed to the voice of the people? It seemed as if the nation had been pressing on blindfold, and we opened our eyes only to behold the precipice over which we were rushing; as if the time-honored rights which had been fought for on British ground, and which our fathers had inherited, not won, were again to be struggled for. The car of Liberty had rolled back four centuries, and the contest whose history is written on the battlefields and scaffolds of England had been all in vain. Well might hope sicken, and the bravest despair.

And who does not recollect the thrill of enthusiastic feeling with which we heard that Adams had thrown himself into the gap, and was contending, at first single-handed, for the right of the citizen to petition, no matter what his creed, his color, or his party? The effort was the nobler in that he was not a member of the body of men in whose persons this right had been invaded. No interest of his or of his friends had been touched. Against our efforts he had all along protested; but, statesman-like, he saw the end from the beginning. When rights were invaded, he was willing to side with any who rallied to protect them. How much truer to the name he bore than many others who stood higher in our esteem, and were dearer to us, than himself! We hail him as the champion of free principles. We accord to him the high merit of a pure attachment to civil liberty which would not permit her to be attacked, even when she appeared in the garb of a party which it was his interest, and he felt it to be his duty, to oppose; of a clear-sighted, far-reaching wisdom, which discovered the first approach of corruption and snuffed oppression in the tainted breeze; of a noble disregard to party lines, when to have adhered to them would have compromised the fundamental principles of our government.

The supineness of the North under the act of Southern aggression, and still more, the indifference with which Calhoun's bill was generally received, are the strongest arguments we can offer to our fellow-citizens to induce them to look at this subject. Why, such a proposition on any other occasion would have set the whole country in a blaze! It would have sent an electric shock through the land, and called forth from its slumbering retreats all the spirit of olden time. What is it that thus palsies our strength and blinds our foresight? We have become so familiar with slavery that we are no longer aware of its deadening influence on the body politic. Pinkney's words have become true: The stream of general liberty cannot flow on unpolluted through the mire of partial bondage. And this is the reason we render to those who ask us why we are contending against Southern slavery,--that it may not result in Northern slavery; because time has shown that it sends out its poisonous branches over all our fair land, and corrupts the very air we breathe. Our fate is bound up with that of the South, so that they cannot be corrupt and we sound; they cannot fall, and we stand. Disunion is coming, unless we discuss this subject; for the spirit of freedom and the spirit of slavery are contending here for the mastery. They cannot live together: as well, like the robber of classic fable, chain the living and the dead together, as bind up such discordant materials, and think it will last. We must prosper, and a sound public opinion root out slavery from the land, or there must grow up a mighty slaveholding State to overshadow and mildew our free institutions.

I have said, Mr. President, that we owe gratitude to Mr. Adams for his defence of the right of petition. A little while ago it would have been absurd to talk of gratitude being due to any man for such a service. It would have been said, Why, he only did his duty, what every other man would have done; it was too simple and plain a case to need a thought. But it is true that, now, even for this we ought to be grateful. And this fact is another, a melancholy proof of the stride which the influence of slavery has made within a few years. It throws such dimness over the minds of freemen that what would once have been thought the alphabet of civil right, they hail as a discovery.

But I will not wander from my subject to slavery; it is our own rights which are at issue; and the first cry that awakened the nation to the importance of that issue, was the voice of the Ex-President. On that gray discrowned head were fixed, in awful suspense, the eyes of the nation. Others came at length to his aid. I wish this resolution may pass, that, as far as in us lies, he may feel that Massachusetts echoes back his cry to arms, is ready to sustain him and his colleagues in their noble course, is girding herself for the contest,--and, come what may, will see to it that, however the lights of other States may flicker with the breeze, her torch shall burn bright and unchanging on the eminence which she has never deserted or betrayed.

This letter was written in England in the summer of 1809, and read by Mr. Thompson at the Anniversary of the Glasgow Emancipation Society in that year.

My dear Thompson,--I am very sorry to say no to your pressing request, but I cannot come to Glasgow; duty takes me elsewhere. My heart will be with you though, on the 1st of August, and I need not say how much pleasure it would give me to meet, on that day especially, the men to whom my country owes so much, and on the spot dear to every American Abolitionist as the scene of your triumphant refutation and stern rebuke of Breckinridge. I do not think any of you can conceive the feelings with which an American treads such scenes. You cannot realize the debt of gratitude he feels to be due, and is eager to pay to those who have spoken in behalf of humanity, and whose voices have come to him across the water. The vale of Leven, Exeter Hall, Glasgow, and Birmingham are consecrated spots,--the land of Scoble and Sturge, of Wardlaw and Buxton, of Clarkson and O'Connell, is hallowed ground to us.

Would I could be with you, to thank the English Abolitionists, in the slave's name, for the great experiment they have tried in behalf of humanity; for proving in the face of the world the safety and expediency of immediate emancipation; for writing out the demonstration of the problem as if with letters of light on the blue vault of heaven; to thank them, too, for the fidelity with which they have rebuked the apathy, and denounced the guilt of the American Church, in standing aloof from this great struggle for freedom in modern times. The appeals and exhortations which have from time to time gone out from among you may seem to have fallen to the ground in vain; but, far from it, they have awakened, in some degree at least, a slumbering Church to a great national sin, and they have strengthened greatly hands that were almost ready to faint in the struggle with a giant evil. We need them still; spare us not a moment from your Christian rebukes; give us line upon line and precept upon precept.

Our enterprise is eminently a religious one, dependent for success entirely on the religious sentiment of the people. It is on hearts that wait not for the results of West India experiments, that look to duty and not to consequences, that disdain to make the fears of one class of men the measure of the rights of another, that fear no evil in the doing of God's commands,--it is on such that the weight of our cause mainly rests, and on the conversion of those whose characters will make them such that its future progress must depend. It is upon just such minds that your appeals have most effect. I hardly exaggerate when I say that the sympathy and brotherly appeals of British Christians are the sheet-anchor of our cause. Did they realize that slavery is now most frequently defended in America from the Bible,--that when Abolitionists rebuke the Church for upholding it, they are charged with hostility to Christianity itself, they would feel this. If we construe a text in favor of liberty, it is set down to partiality and prejudice. A European construction is decisive. Our rebukes lose much of their force when they are represented, though falsely, to spring from personal hostility,--from a zeal which undue attention to a single subject has made to outrun discretion. Your appeals sink deep,--they can neither be avoided nor blunted by any such pretence, and their first result must be conviction. Distance lends them something of the awful weight of the verdict of posterity. May they never cease! Let the light of your example shine constantly upon us, till our Church, beneath its rays, like Egypt's statue, shall break forth into the music of consistent action.

England, too, is the fountain-head of our literature. The slightest censure, every argument, every rebuke on the pages of your reviews, strikes on the ear of the remotest dweller in our country. Thank God, that in this the sceptre has not yet departed from Judah, that it dwells still in the land of Vane and Milton, of Pym and Hampden, of Sharp and Cowper and Wilberforce:--

May those upon whom rests their mantle be true to the realms they sway! You have influence where we are not even heard. The prejudice which treads under foot the vulgar Abolitionist dares not proscribe the literature of the world. In the name of the slave, I beseech you, let literature speak out, in deep, stern, and indignant tones, for the press,--

I am rejoiced to hear of your new movement in regard to India. It seals the fate of the slave system in America. The industry of the pagan shall yet wring from Christian hands the prey they would not yield to the commands of conscience or the claims of religion. Hasten the day, for it lies with you, when the prophecy of our Randolph (himself a slave-holder) shall be fulfilled,--that the time would come when masters would fly their slaves, instead of slaves their masters, so valueless would be a slave's labor in comparison with his support To you, to the sunny plains of Hindostan, we shall owe it, that our beautiful prairies are unpolluted by the footsteps of a slave-holder; that the march of civilization westward will be changed from the progress of the manacled slave coffle, at the bidding of the lash, to the quiet step of families, carrying peace, intelligence, and religion as their household gods Mr. Clay has coolly calculated the value of sinews and muscles, of the bodies and souls of men, and then asked us whether we could reasonably expect the South to surrender 1,200,000,000 dollars at the bidding of abstract principles. Be just to India; waken that industry along her coast which oppression has kept landlocked and idle, break the spell which binds the genius of her fertile plains, and we shall see this property in man become like the gold in India's fairy tales,--dust in the slave-holder's grasp!

You cannot imagine, my dear brother, the impulse this new development of England's power will give the Antislavery cause in America. It is just what we need to touch a class of men who seem almost out of the pale of religious influence. Much as our efforts have been blessed, much as they have accomplished, though truth has often floated further on the shouts of a mob than our feeble voices could have carried it,--still our progress has served but to show us more clearly the Alps which lie beyond. The evil is so deep-rooted, the weight of interest and prejudice on its side so vast,--ambition clinging to political power, wealth to the means of further gain,--that we have sometimes feared they would be able to put off emancipation till the charter of the slaves' freedom would be sealed with blood, that our day of freedom would be like Egypt's, when God came forth from his place, his right hand clothed in thunder, and the jubilee of Israel was echoed by Egypt's wailing for her first-born.

It is not the thoughtful, the sober-minded, the conscientious, for whom we fear. With them truth will finally prevail. It is not that we want eloquence or Christian zeal enough to sustain the conflict with such, and with your aid to come off conquerors. We know, as your Whately says of Galileo, that if Garrison could have been answered, he had never been mobbed; that May's Christian firmness, Smith's world-wide philanthropy, Chapman's daring energy, and Weld's soul of fire can never be quelled, and will finally kindle a public feeling before which opposition must melt away. But how hard to reach the callous heart of selfishness, the blinded conscience, over which a corrupt Church has thrown its shield lest any ray of truth pierce its dark chambers. How shall we address that large class of men with whom dollars are always a weightier consideration than duties, prices current stronger argument than proofs of holy writ? But India can speak in tones which will command a hearing. Our appeal has been entreaty, for the times in America are those party times, when-

Speech delivered at the First Annual Meeting of the British India Society, held at Freemason's Hall, London, July 6, 1840. In presenting a resolution relating to the effect of the cultivation of cotton in British India upon slavery in the United States, Mr. Phillips said:--

It is now ten years since the friends of the negro in America first put forth the demand for the unconditional abolition of slavery. They thought they would have nothing more to do than to show that emancipation would be safe, that it would be just; and having proved that, that it would, in such a liberty-loving country, at once be cordially and willingly acceded to in every State from Maine to Georgia; but at the end of the long period of ten years they have done almost nothing. Had it not been for their perseverance and zeal, the more devoted because of the difficulties they had met with, long, long ago they would have been put down, they must have folded their arms in despair, and have given up all hope of bloodless emancipation. When they heard of the British India Society and its objects, the news burst upon their ear, and was as startling and as grateful as must have been the first cry of land to Columbus when he was plunged almost in despair. [Cheers.] They through it saw again a peaceful hope for the slave, and then every friend of abolition rallied round it, and placed their plan prominently before the country. Many at first doubted: they deemed it but one more of the many fables to which India had given rise; they deemed it a very fiction, but I trust through the exertions of the society they will find it-

If it is a fact that there are 24,000,000 acres within reach of the Ganges, upon which cotton can be grown, now lying waste ; if it is true that there are 54,000,000 men anxious for labor, and that their services can be had for a penny or two-pence a day; if they can bring their cotton to Liverpool at four-pence per pound,--how can slavery stand against it at a cost of a shilling a day? Commerce is incompatible with slavery: in England it has put down the system of villeinage; in France it put an end to vassalage; it has done more than Christianity, of which it is a good forerunner. It is one of the most immutable of truths, that the moment a free hand touches an article, that moment it falls from the hand of the slave. Witness the beet sugar of France; the moment it was made, her West India colonists applied for protection against the eternal principles of commerce and freedom. [Hear, hear!] So it was with indigo. Formerly it was all slave produce; now, not an ounce of it is. I need not give further examples, for the principle is as immutable as the laws of Nature. No article can be grown and manufactured at the same time by both free and slave labor. The fathers of this country thought in the settlement of their independence they had put down slavery: but, unfortunately, in 1786, when it was about to cease, a small bag of cotton-seed was found in Carolina; it was almost by accident put in the ground, and it was found that cotton could be grown, and so slavery was perpetuated. Slavery can only be maintained by monopoly; the moment she comes into competition with free labor, she dies. Cotton is the corner-stone of slavery in America; remove it, and slavery receives its mortal blow. [Hear, hear!]

I am glad to see such a society grow up in the land of Clarkson and of Wilberforce, the great fathers of Antislavery. I am glad that England is awakening to a sense of her power, and I pray God she may arouse herself as one man, and exert that power for the sake of humanity all over the world.

It is not the fault of America that slavery exists; it is the fault of England that bribed her with £14,000,000 a year, and it is the price of cotton in the Liverpool market that signs the death warrant of the poor slaves. [Cheers.] There are a class of men in America that would not listen to the voice of an angel, or to one risen from the dead. The denunciations of O'Connell are nothing to them, while the balance is on the right side of the ledger; they must have Antislavery preached in their counting-houses, or it will never be preached at all. [Cheers. The only voice they will listen to is the 6Gazette that publishes them bankrupts, and the auctioneer who knocks down their houses to the highest bidder. It is England that delays that day by paying them £14,000,000 annually for their support. [Hear, hear!] One hundred per cent profit is better than the most eloquent lips that ever spoke. You may think it strange for an American to speak thus of a system that is to make bankrupt one half of his country, and paralyze the other; but though I love my country, I love my countrymen more, and these countrymen are the colored men of America. [Cheers.] For their sakes I say, welcome the bolt that smites our commerce to the dust, if with it, by the blessing of God, it will strike off the fetters of the slave. [Cheers. But I do not fear British India. Deliver America from the incubus of slavery, and her beautiful prairies will beat the banks of the Ganges. Free America from the incubus of slavery, and Yankee skill in the fruitful valleys of the South will beat England and British India in any market in the world.

I beg permission to read to the meeting the message of one who may justly be considered a far higher authority than any who have spoken from this platform; and observe, this is not an after-thought. It is not a new project, for years back it had the devoted advocacy of Cropper, and fifteen years ago, Clarkson, in a private letter to a friend, suggested it as the only remedy for slavery in the transatlantic world. You will pardon me for reading a portion of the speech the venerable Clarkson prepared in writing, and intended to deliver at the opening of the General Antislavery Convention:--

My dear friends, you have a most difficult task to perform; it is neither more nor less than the extirpation of slavery from the whole world. Your opponents who appear the most formidable are the cotton and other planters in the southern parts of the United States; who, I am grieved to say, hold more than two million of their fellow-creatures in the most cruel bondage. Now we know of these men, that they are living in the daily habits of injustice, cruelty, and oppression, and may be therefore said to have no true fear of God, nor any just sense of religion. You cannot, therefore, expect to have the same hold upon the consciences of these that you have upon the consciences of others. How then can you get at these so as to influence their conduct? There is but one way; you must endeavor to make them feel their guilt in its consequences. You must endeavor, by all justifiable means, to affect their temporal interests. You must endeavor, among other things, to have the produce of free tropical labor brought into the markets of Europe, and undersell them there; and if you can do this, your victory is sure.

Now that this is possible, that this may be done, there is no question. The East India Company alone can do it of themselves, and they can do it by means that are perfectly moral and pacific, according to your own principles,--namely, by the cultivation of the earth, and by the employment of free labor. They may, if they please, not only have the high honor of abolishing slavery and the slave trade, but the advantage of increasing their revenue beyond all calculation: for, in the first place, they have land in their possession twenty times more than equal to the supply of all Europe with tropical produce; in the second place, they can procure, not tens of thousands, but tens of millions of free laborers to work; in the third, what is of the greatest consequence in this case, the price of labor with these is only from a penny to three half-pence a day. What slavery can stand against these prices?

I learn, too, from letters which I have seen from India, and from the Company's own reports, that they have long been engaged — shall I say providentially engaged?--in preparing seeds for the cultivation of cotton there. Now, if we take into considerations all these previous preparations (by which it appears that they are ready to start), and add to this the consideration that they could procure, not tens of thousands, but tens of millions of free laborers to work,--_ I speak from authority,--I believe that if they would follow up their plans heartily and with spirit, according to their means, in the course of six years they would materially affect the price of this article at market, and in twelve that they would be able to turn the tide completely against the growers of it in the United States.

And here I would observe that this is not a visionary or fanciful statement. Look at the American newspapers; look at the American pamphlets which have come out upon this subject; look at the opinion of the celebrated Judge Jay on this subject also: all, all confess, and the planters too confess — but the latter with fear and trembling — that if the East India Company should resolve upon the cultivation of tropical products in India, and carry it to the extent to which they would be capable of carrying it, it is all over with American slavery.

Gentlemen, I have mentioned these circumstances, not with a view of dictating to you any particular plan of operations, but only to show you the possibility of having your great object accomplished, and this to its fullest extent; for what I have said relatively to the United States is equally applicable to Cuba, Brazil, and other parts of the South American continent,--and besides, the East India Company have twenty times more land than is sufficient to enable them to compete with them all.

The proprietors and conductors of the American newspapers, to which Mr. Clarkson refers, are the agents of the banks, and the agents of the slave-holders. It is not their policy to endeavor to raise and secure a high price in the market of Liverpool, for fear the eyes of Great Britain should be turned to her possessions in the East, where, as they express it, there are no doubt exhaustless resources for the cultivation of cotton; for they see that if the attention of Great Britain were directed to that quarter, America would lose the market and slavery together. [Hear, hear!] Twice they thought the deathblow was given to the system in America, and twice have they been disappointed. But take care, in carrying out this plan, that the protection thrown over India does not bring forth into life weeds as well as flowers. Take care that slavery does not gather strength with the rest of your institutions which will be strengthened in India; and that it does not, as it has done in America, monopolize the resources of another world in the East. This is the only danger that can be anticipated in the progress of this society. Take care that in driving our cotton from your shores, you do not admit a single pound that i equally blood-stained with our own.

At a meeting in favor of the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia, held in Faneuil Hall, Boston, Friday evening, January 28, 1842, the chairman presented an Irish address to the Irish residents of the United States signed by Daniel O'Connell, Father Mathew, and sixty thousand other Irishmen, calling upon all Irish men in America to espouse the Antislavery cause. Mr. Phillips then offered the following resolutions, which after his advocacy were adopted by acclamation:--

Resolved, That we rejoice that the voice of O'Connell, which now shakes the three kingdoms, has poured across the waters a thunderpeal for the cause of liberty in our own land; and that Father Mathew, having lifted with one hand five millions of his own countrymen into moral life, has stretched forth the other — which may Heaven make equally potent — to smite off the fetters of the American slave.

Resolved, That we receive with the deepest gratitude the names of the sixty thousand Irishmen who, in the trial-hour of their own struggle for liberty, have not forgotten the slave on this side the water; that we accept with triumphant exultation the address they have forwarded to us, and pledge ourselves to circulate it through the length and breadth of our land, till the pulse of every man who claims Irish parentage beats true to the claims of patriotism and humanity.

Mr. Phillips said :--

I hold in my hand, Mr. Chairman, a resolution expressive of our thanks to the sixty thousand Irishmen who have sent us that token of their sympathy and interest, and specially to those high and gallant spirits who lead the noble list. I must say that never have I stood in the presence of an audience with higher hopes of the rapid progress and success of our cause than now. I remember with what devoted earnestness, with what unfaltering zeal, Ireland has carried on so many years the struggle for her own freedom. It is from such men, whose hearts lost no jot of their faith in the grave of Emmett; over whose zeal the loss of Curran and Grattan could throw no damp; who are now turning the trophies of one field into weapons for new conquest; whom a hireling press and prejudiced public could never sever a moment from O'Connell's side,--it is from the sympathy of such men that we have a right to hope much.

The image of the generous Isle not only comes to us crowned with the spoil of every science, and decked with the wreath of every muse, but we cannot forget that she lent to Waterloo the sword which cut the despot's shattered sceptre through; and to American ears, the crumbled walls of St. Stephen's yet stand to echo the eloquence of her Burke, when at the foot of the British throne he took his place side by side with that immortal rebel [pointing to the picture of Washington]. From a priest of the Catholic Church we might expect superiority to that prejudice against color which freezes the sympathies of our churches, when Humanity points to the slave. I remember that African lips may join in the chants of the Church, unrebuked even under the proud dome of St. Peter's; and I have seen the colored man in the sacred dress pass with priest and student beneath the frowning portals of the College of the Propaganda at Rome, with none to sneer at his complexion, or repulse him from society. I remember that a long line of Popes, from Leo to Gregory, have denounced the sin of making merchandise of men; that the voice of Rome was the first to be heard against the slave-trade; and that the bull of Gregory XVI., forbidding every true Catholic to touch the accursed thing, is yet hardly a year old.

Ireland is the land of agitation and agitators. We may well learn a lesson from her in the battle for human rights. Her philosophy is no recluse; she doffs the cowl, and quits the cloister, to grasp in friendly effort the hands of the people. No pulses beat truer to liberty and humanity than those which in Dublin quicken at every good word from. abolition on this side the ocean; there can be no warmer words of welcome than those which greet the American Abolitionists on their thresholds.

Let not any persuade us, Mr. Chairman, that the question of slavery is no business of ours, but belongs entirely to the South. Northern opinion, the weight of Northern power, is the real slave-holder of America. Their presence in the Union is the Carolinians' charter of safety,--the dread of the Northern bayonet is their real police. Without it the whole South were but the deck of a larger Creole,

The brig Creole, of Richmond, Va., left Norfolk for New Orleans, October 30, 1841, with a cargo of tobacco and 135 slaves on board. November 7, the slaves took possession of the boat, killed the second mate in the struggle, and wounded some others who resisted, but otherwise inflicted no personal injury. They then turned the boat toward Nassau, New Providence. The ring-leaders were there arrested and held for mutiny and murder, and the rest of the slaves were set free. The British government refused to extradite the prisoners, or restore the slaves to their masters.

A reception to George Thompson, in Faneuil Hall, November 15, 1850, was broken up by an angry mob. The meeting was therefore adjourned to Worcester, and supplemented by other meetings in several cities. At the reception in Lynn, November 26, 1850, Mr. Phillips delivered the following speech:--

This is certainly, fellow-citizens, a glad sight for my eloquent friend to look upon; these enthusiastic crowds, pressing to extend to him a welcome, and do their part in atonement for the scenes of 1835, and to convince him that even now, not as Boston speaks so speaks the State [cheers]; and yet, it is not in our power, my friends, with all our numbers or zeal, to tender to our guest so real, so impressive a compliment as that with which Faneuil Hall flattered him, the 15th day of this month. Indignation, it has been well said, is itself flavored with a season of compliment. How potent has a man a right to consider his voice, when a whole nation rises to gag him! No sooner does our friend announce his intention of visiting these shores, no sooner does he set his face hitherward, than the whole press howls in concert, and alarm encamps all along our seaboard. One would imagine his brow must be like that of the archangel Byron describes, and that-

Speech delivered at the Antislavery Bazaar, Saturday evening, December 27, 1851.

I have been requested to consider this evening, the position which Kossuth occupies in relation to the Antislavery cause in America. I need not say to those who have traced the course of this illustrious man, that it must be with the profoundest regret that any one who loves liberty can utter the first word of criticism in regard to him. His life has been, up to the time of his landing on our shores, one continued sacrifice on the altar of his country's independence. He has never forgotten her. He gave her the bloom of his youth. He has given her the first fruits of his genius. He has been true to her amid the temptations of ambitious life. He has been her martyr in the horrible dungeons of the despots of Europe. He stood by her equally under temptations of success. His name has become synonymous with patriotism and devotion to the rights of his race. He came to us heralded by the sympathies of every one who had a heart either for the sufferers by the oppressions of Europe, or for those who lie under the weight of the far greater oppressions of our own country. Not only this, but he came to us indebted to the government of the United States. Words of gratitude from his lips were both natural and fitting. I-T could not do otherwise than be grateful. He had a right to pour out, with Oriental profuseness, the overflowing thanks of one who had been rescued from the heavy yoke of Russia, and allowed to plead his cause face to face with the millions of the west of Europe, and of our own land. It was something to be thankful for. No one can find fault with him for any grateful words which he has uttered, on touching the land under whose flag he first raised his head, no longer a prisoner, hardly an exile. He might well, as in classic story, have fallen down and kissed the deck of that national frigate which was to be his rostrum, with the world for an audience. You will not understand me, therefore, as endeavoring to disparage the momentous service which he has rendered to the Slavonic races of Europe, the purity of his purpose, his gallant daring, the energy which he has displayed,--no, nor to find fault with the gratitude which he has expressed to America. All this it was his duty to do. But there was something more expected of him. That expectation has been disappointed. I shall not attempt, for it is not in the mood either of the speaker or of any one who listens to him, to indulge in any epithets which shall characterize his course. I want to state a few simple principles, and then a few pregnant facts, and ask you whether the Abolitionists of this country have not a fair charge to make against the great Hungarian; whether those men who wait always with patient expectation the coming of those great and noble spirits who are to drag forward the cause of human progress, at least a hand's breadth, have not a right to be disappointed, and withdraw themselves from the crowd of idolators around him who has been designated as the man of the nineteenth century, as the van leader of the reform spirit of the age, as one whose boundless capacity, purity of purpose, and the universality of whose sympathies, almost merited that we should take the statue of Washington from its pedestal, and replace it with the form of the great Hungarian.

This, then, is my purpose,--to look at Kossuth as the slave would look at him. Let me preface what I have to say with a single remark about America. You will recollect the old story of the African chief, seated naked under his palm-tree to receive the captain of an English frigate, and the first question he asked was, What do they say of me in England? We laugh at this vanity of a naked savage, canopied by a palm-tree, on an unknown river somewhere in the desert of a barbarous continent; but the same spirit pervades our twenty millions of Americans. The heart of every man is constantly asking the question, What do they say of us in England? Europe is the great tribunal for whose decision American sensitiveness always stands waiting in awe. We declared our independence, in 1876, of the British Crown, but we are vassals, to-day, of British opinion. So far as concerns American literature or American thought, the sceptre has never departed from Judah; it dwells yet with the elder branch on the other side of the water. The American still looks with too servile admiration to the institutions which his fathers reluctantly quitted, and which he still regards with overmuch fondness. Our literature is but a pale reflection of the English mind; and one reason why we have never become more thoroughly democratic is because, while our institutions have been so in form, the whole literature upon which we lived was impregnated with English ideas, and every student and every thinker breathed the atmosphere of London. London is yet the great fount of ideas for all the Saxon race. Not until the principles of democracy shall enter Temple Bar, will the Saxon race be fully democratic, whether planted on the steppes of the Cordilleras or on the shores of the Pacific. What is thus true of England, is true in a less degree of the rest of Europe.

Now, it is to such a nation as this that Kossuth comes, -a nation sensitive to a fault, servile to the last degree; catching, with a watchful interest, the first breath of foreign criticism; hugging to its bosom with delight any eulogy that falls from the lips of noted men on the other side of the water. Is there anything peculiar and to be remarked in the state of public affairs at the time of his visit? Yes; he comes precisely at the moment when one absorbing question has banished all others from the nation's mind. The great classes and interests of society crash and jostle against each other like mighty vessels in a storm. The slave question having, like Aaron's rod, devoured all other political issues, claims and keeps the undivided attention of excited millions. The lips of every public man are anxiously watched, and his lightest word scanned with relentless scrutiny. Pulpit and forum are both busy in the discussion of the profoundest questions as to the relations of the citizen to the law, and the real value and strength of our institutions. For the first time, some men have begun to doubt whether they are compatible with free speech and Christianity; while men, called statesmen, either emboldened by success, or hardened by desperate ambition, have been found ready openly to declare that the Union is possible only on condition that the sons of the Pilgrims consent to hunt the slaves, and smother those instincts which have made the poets of all ages love to linger round the dungeon of the patriot and the stake of the martyr,with Tell and Wallace, with Lafayette and Silvio Pellico, with Charles Stuart hunted by the soldiery of Cromwell, and the Covenanter shot by that same Charles Stuart at his cottage door.

Kossuth lands on a shore where humanity is illegal, and obedience to the Golden Rule of Christianity has just been declared treason. He was not ignorant of this state of things. Private individuals and public societies in England had placed in his hands ample evidence of the real character of American institutions, and the critical state of public opinion on the momentous question of enslaving every sixth man, woman, and child in the land. Some besought him to pause ere he set foot on a land cursed with such a monstrous system of oppression, and all bade him beware of the temptation to which his position subjected him, of strengthening by his silence or approbation the hands of the oppressor. At such a time, and in the midst of such a people, we have a right to claim that he should walk carefully. He knew that he must throw the weight of his mighty name in the scale of one party or another that was waging war for principle on this side of the Atlantic. Senator Foot spoke truly when he said, from his seat in the Senate chamber, There is a great struggle going on through the world. It is between despotism and liberty. There is no neutrality in this struggle. No man can fail to be on one side or the other. He that is not with us is against us. To which John P. Hale replied with such readiness, Exactly. We have now that condition of affairs which George Canning prophesied when he said, The next war that passes over Europe is to be a war of ideas. Now, wherever there is the war of ideas, every tongue takes a side. There is no neutrality. Even silence is not neutrality; but he who speaks a word of sympathy to his brother-man is on the side of humanity and progress. [Loud cheers.]

Now I have brought three facts before you. A man whose simple name is an argument, whose opinion is a fact potent throughout the world in sustaining institutions of government,--I have placed him in the midst of a people with every eye fixed upon him to note his course and learn his opinion; I have shown that he is not ignorant of this his critical position. What has he done? No man expected that he should come into this hall; that he should go into Antislavery meetings; that he should take ground against the Fugitive Slave Bill. No. But you remember when Alexander went to see Diogenes, and asked what he could do for him, the reply of the cynic was, Stand out of my light! Now the slave had at least the right to say to Kossuth, Stand out of my light! Let the glowing sun of the humanity of the nineteenth century strike full upon me. Let the light and heat of those generous ideas with which God has inspired some of the white race, fall upon me, to melt these chains of mine; and let not your lavish praise be the spell that shall lull to sleep the half-awakened conscience of a people who have just begun to attend to the neglected, and to remember the forgotten. Throw not the weight of your great name into the scale of those, my enemies, who glory in a national prosperity fed out of my veins, and worship a Union cemented with my blood.

Take his speeches. Do they differ from those of the most pro-slavery American? Does he qualify his eulogy, does he limit his praise? Has he a word of sympathy for the oppressed,--a hint, even, at any blot on our national escutcheon? Could he have spoken without taking a side, unless he had used the most guarded and qualified language? Take his speeches relating to the Constitution of the United States. Place them side by side with the speeches of Daniel Webster and Rufus Choate, with those of any of the men recognized as supporters of this Union for its very quality of being an added ligament to hold the slave to his master. Is not the tone the same? Is not the eulogy of our Constitution as unqualified and as glowing? Do you ever find the slightest allusion to the fact that one-sixth part of the inhabitants under it are denied those personal rights which make the sufferings of the Magyar peasant tame in comparison Throughout this flood of sublime eloquence which he has poured forth with such lavish genius to applauding crowds, when has he been heard to speak a word for three millions of people in this land, outraged and trampled under foot, to intimate that he sympathized with them, to hint that he knew of their existence? Our country is great, glorious, and free; the land of protection for the persecuted sons of freedom among the great brotherhood of nations. This is his language.

As I am speaking of one so much praised and trusted, let me read to you two or three lines, to show the tone in which he speaks of the Union whose President and courts have been occupied more fully, the last twelve months, with the recapture of fugitive slaves, and with the trial of men who had nobly aided them, than with any other cases whatever,--a Union of which Daniel Webster says the Fugitive Slave Bill is the very bond and corner-stone, that it cannot exist without it; a Union pledged to pursue and recapture every man who has the heroism to escape from Southern bondage. Oppressed men will look to your memory as a token of God that there is hope for freedom on earth, --this of a Union that returned Sims and Long to their chains, and by which fugitives have been returned by dozens from Ohio and Pennsylvania!--because there is a people like you to feel its worth and support its cause. Europe has many things to learn from America. It has to learn the value of free institutions, and the expansive power of freedom. And this is a fair type of his general language. You know it.

We have just closed a war for the perpetuity of slavery (every man, North or South, acknowledges it),a war which even the Senate of the United States pronounced wicked and unnecessary; which the noblest intellects of the land have reprobated; which all parties have justified on the ground of its necessity to preserve the Union by aiding slavery, and not on the ground of justice, of humanity, or of liberty. What does he say of it? Take, for instance, the glorious, --we sent out a party from a slave State across to Mexican territories: we, Protestants, set up slavery on the soil which Catholics had purged from the stain,--Take, for instance, the glorious struggle you had not long ago with Mexico, in which General Scott drove the President of that Republic from his capital. Mark you that language! I shall have occasion to refer to it again.

I know how to read your people's heart. It is so easy to read it, because it is open like Nature, and unpolluted (!) like a virgin's heart (!!). Many others shut their ears to the cry of oppressed humanity, because they regard duties but through the glass of petty interests. Your people has that instinct of justice and generosity (!) which is the stamp of mankind's heavenly origin; and it is conscious of your country's power; it is jealous of its own dignity; it knows that it has the power to restore the law of nations to the principles of justice and right; and knowing itself to have the power, it is willing to be as good as it is powerful.

These are the twenty millions of people whom George Thompson, with such striking truth, has described as engaged in one great slave hunt, with their President at their head, pursuing a poor, trembling fugitive, flying for refuge to the flag of Great Britain, on the other side of the lakes. Your people have that instinct of justice and generosity which is the stamp of mankind's heavenly origin (!!!).

May your kind anticipations of me be not disappointed! I am but a plain man. I have nothing in me but honest fidelity to those principles which have made you great, and my most ardent wish is, that my own country may be, if not great as yours, at least as free and as happy, which it will be in the establishment of the same great principles. The sounds that I now hear seem to me the trumpet of resurrection for down-trodden humanity throughout the world.

What! free as the land where the Bible is refused to every sixth person! Free as the land where it is a crime to teach every sixth person to read! Free as the land where, by statute, every sixth woman may be whipped at the public whipping-post! Free as the land where the murderer of the black man, if the deed is perpetrated only in the presence of blacks, is secure from legal punishment! Free as the land, the banks of whose Mississippi were lit up with the horrid sight, not seen even in Europe for two centuries, of a man torn from the hands of justice and burned in his own blood by a mob, of whom the highest legal authority proclaimed, afterward, that their act was the act of the people, and above the notice of the judiciary! Free as the land, the beautiful surface of whose Ohio was polluted by the fragments of three presses,--the emblems of free speech,--and no tribunal has taken notice of these deeds! Free as the land, whose prairie has drunk in the first Saxon blood shed for the right of free speech for a century and a half,--I mean the blood of Lovejoy! Free as the land where the fugitive dares not proclaim his name in the cities of New England, and skulks in hiding-places until he can conceal himself on board a vessel, and make his way to the kind shelter of Liverpool and London! Free as the land where a hero worthy to stand by the side of Louis Kossuth — I mean Ellen Crafts [great cheering]--has pistols lying by her bedside for weeks, as protection against your marshals and your sheriffs, your chief-justices and divines, and finds no safe refuge until she finds it in the tender mercies of the wife of that poet who did his service to the cause of freedom at Missolonghi!

But what does Kossuth wish for Hungary? My most ardent wish is, that my own country may be, if not as great as yours, at least as free and as happy, which it will be in the establishment of the same great principles. As free and as happy ! Is that all that the loving son of Hungary can ask for his native land? Would he thrust back to serfdom one-sixth part of her twelve millions? Would he not blush to stand so near even to Austria, who compels her peasantry to learn to read, and make the teaching of every sixth Hungarian a penal offence? Would he legislate into existence a nation of Haynaus, and authorize them to whip Magyar women? Would he fill Hungarian prisons with Draytons and Sayres, with Torreys and Fairbankses? Hungarian graves with Crandalls and Lovejoys? Would he hang his courts in chains, that his brother nobles might drag back their serfs in peace? Before he repeats such a wish, let him go and meditate one hour more in that dungeon whence one of his comrades went to his grave, and the other came out blind; let him send his thoughts back again to that refuge which the Sultan gave him when he refused, at the hazard of his Crescent, to surrender to his neighbor State the Hungarian Crafts, Sims, Long, etc., who had escaped and claimed his protection. He would, if he be the man the world believes him, learn there that he never could consent to make Hungary what these United States are, and that he begs aid for his loved country too dear, if he begs it by words not truthful from the lips of Louis Kossuth.

Happy art thou, free nation of America, that thou hast founded thy house upon the only solid basis of a nation's liberty! Thou hast no tyrants among thee to throw the apple of Eros into thy Union! Thou hast no tyrants to raise the fury of hatred in thy national family! This he says, when he knows that the newspapers of one half the Union are full of the records of the atrocities perpetrated by the white man upon the blacks, guilty of nothing but a skin not colored like their own. I defy Kossuth to find in any German paper, at the very fount of Austrian despotism, such advertisements as daily fill our Southern presses. I defy him to match the crimes and wickedness of the press that leagues with despotism in this land. Mothers sold with their infants six weeks old, together or apart. I defy him to match the advertisements coming from our Southern States, calling for a man or his head: Fifty dollars reward for a man, dead or alive!

A land with three millions of slaves, and not a tyrant! Free speech achieved on the floor of Congress only after a dozen years of struggle, and still a penal offence in one half the Union; our jails filled with men guilty only of helping a brother-man to his liberty,--yet the keen eyes of this great soul can see nothing but a solid basis of Liberty ! Southern Conventions to dissolve the Union; the law executed in Boston at the point of the bayonet; riot, as the government calls it, stalking through the streets of Detroit, Buffalo, Syracuse, Boston, Christiana, and New York; Massachusetts denied by statute the right to bring an action in South Carolina; Georgia setting a price on the head of a Boston printer; senators threatening to hang a brother senator, should he set foot in a Southern State; the very tenants of the pulpit silenced, or subjected to a coat of tar and feathers; one State proposing to exclude the commerce of another; demagogue statesmen perambulating the country to save the Union; honest men exhorted to stifle their consciences, for fear the Ship of State should sink amid the breakers; the whole nation at last waking to Jefferson's conviction, that we have the wolf by the ears; we can neither hold him nor safely let him go, --yet this man, whose tempest-tossed life has somewhat sharpened the eyes of his soul, can see only a solid basis of Liberty No tyrant to throw the apple of Eros in the Union; to raise the fury of hatred in thy national family What place has such fulsome and baseless eulogy on the lips of a truthful and honest man?

I have a great deal more of the same tenor, but I shall weary your patience. You will not deny that this has been the general tenor of his addresses in America. Now, he says, I do it because I love Hungary so much.

Well, then, he is a patriotic and devoted Hungarian, -grant him that! He loves Hungary so much that his charity stops at the banks of the Danube. He is a lover of his mother-land. It is a great thing to suffer for one's mother-land; but still, it is a local patriotism. Even Webster loves the whites. It is something to love one's race, and so much is patriotism; but they claim for Kossuth that he represents the highest ideas of the nineteenth century. We do not dispute his title to this, that he has been devoted to Hungary. Grant him that. When Alexander had consecrated himself as a god, he sent word to the Lacedaemonians that he had made himself a god, and they sent him back word, Be a god! So if men only claim for Kossuth that he is ready to do and dare all for Hungary, we are willing to reply with the Lacedaemonians, Be to Hungary her Washington! The time was when even he claimed more, when he could proclaim that the cause of liberty was one the world over. That whoever struck a blow for justice and humanity anywhere, helped the oppressed the wide world through; while he who gave comfort to tyrants was the foe of all peoples. We felt that that lightning which melted the chain of the Hungarian serf, flashed a glad light into every hovel of the Carolinas; and that the blow which Garrison was striking on the gates of the American Bastile, lent strength to hosts that battled on the banks of the Danube. So thought Kossuth once; but is it possible that his conviction was no manly faith, but only a fairy spell which legends tell us a running stream always dissolves, and that the waves of the Atlantic have washed it out, and flung him upon our shores a mere Hungarian exile,--instead of one of those great spirits with which God at rare intervals blesses the ages, with hearts so large that for them the world is their country, and every man, especially every oppressed man, is a brother?

Men say, Why criticise Kossuth, when you have every reason to believe that, in his heart, he sympathizes with you? Just for that reason we criticise him; because he endorses the great American lie, that to save or benefit one class, a man may righteously sacrifice the rights of another. Because, while the American world knows him to be a hater of slavery, they see him silent on that question, hear him eulogize a nation of slave-holders, to carry his point. What greater wrong can he do the slave than thus to strengthen his foes in their own good opinion of themselves, and weaken, by his example, that public rebuke to which alone the negro can trust for ultimate redemption? He whom tyrants hated on the other side the ocean, is the favored guest of tyrants on this side. He eats salt with the Haynaus of Washington. It is high time that he explain to Europe the geographical morality that enables him to do it, and be still the Louis Kossuth whose wandering steps Russian vengeance thought it worth while to follow. Could he have filed his tongue as cunningly at home, why should he ever have left Pesth? Or shall we deem him a man hotly indignant at his own wrongs, and those of his own blood, but cold to those of men whose skin is some few shades darker than his own?

Kossuth has sacrificed the cause of liberty itself; he has consented to praise a nation whose freedom is a sham; he has consented to praise the nation which tramples Mexico under foot; he has consented to praise them that he might save Hungary,--then rate him at his right price. The freedom of twelve millions bought the silence of Louis Kossuth for a year. A world in the scale never bought the silence of O'Connell or Fayette for a moment. That is just the difference between him and them. O'Connell (I was told the anecdote by Sir Thomas Fowell Buxton), in 1859, after his election to the House of Commons, was called upon by the West India interest — some fifty or sixty strong — who said, O'Connell, you have been accustomed to act with Clarkson and Wilberforce, Lushington and Brougham, to speak on the platform of Freemasons' Hall, and advocate what is called the abolition cause. Mark this! If you will break loose from these associates, if you will close your mouth on the slave question, you may reckon on our undivided support on Irish matters. Whenever your country's claims come up, you shall be sure of fifty votes on your side. No! said O'Connell; let God care for Ireland; I will never shut my mouth on the slave question to save her! [Loud cheers.] He stood with eight millions whom he loved; he stood with & peasantry at his back meted out and trodden under foot as cruelly as the Magyar; he stood with those behind him who had been trampled under the horses' feet of the British soldiery in 1782 and 1801; he knew the poverty and wretchedness, he knew the oppression under which the Irish groaned: but never for a moment, would he consent to lift Ireland,--whose woes, we may well suppose, rested heavily on the heart of her greatest son, --by the sacrifice of the interests or the freedom of any other portion of the race. When, said the friend who told me this anecdote, in conclusion,--when there were no more than two or three of us in the House of Commons, O'Connell would leave any court or any meeting to be present at the division, and vote on our side. That is the type of a man who tries by its proper standard the claims of all classes upon his sympathy. He did for Ireland all that God had enabled him to do; but there was one thing which God had not called upon him to do, and that was to speak a falsehood, or to belie his convictions. He did not undertake to serve his country by being silent when he knew he ought to speak, or by speaking in language that should convey a false impression to his hearer.

Kossuth is filled with overflowing love for Hungary, which lies under the foot of the Czar. Now let us suppose a parallel case. Suppose that Lafayette were now living, and that the great Frenchman had seen his idea of liberty for France go down in blood. We will suppose that, despairing of doing anything at home, he had concluded to appeal to some foreign nation for aid; that Fayette, with his European reputation, considered the great apostle of human liberty, and his voice the seal and stamp of republican principles,--Fayette goes to Vienna for help. He goes to Austria for help on his side in French politics, as Kossuth comes here for help on his side of Hungarian politics,--to Austria, with Hungary bleeding at her feet, and Kossuth in exile.

After all, it is national politics in which he asks us to interfere at whatever hazard. What is Hungary? Twelve millions of people under the iron foot of the Russian Czar, by means of his puppet, the Emperor of Austria. What says he to America? I do not wish to be entangled with American politics. As one of our own citizens said to me the other day, What comes this fellow here for? I do not wish to meddle with Austrian politics. The question of the liberty of twelve millions in Hungary is as much a question of Austrian politics, as the question of the three millions of slaves under the United States Constitution, and the human beings sent back as chattels under the Fugitive Slave Law of 1851, is a question of American politics.

Do not think either that I am so far out of the way in sending Fayette to Austria. Let me turn aside before I finish the illustration. What is Austria? Who is Haynau? The culminating star of Austrian atrocity, --the general whose name recalls everything that is most monstrous in Austria's treatment of down-trodden Hungary. Haynau! What was it that the European press charged upon him as his greatest atrocity? Why, he whipped one woman,--a countess; he whipped one woman at the public whipping-post. The press of Europe, from the banks of the Volga to the banks of the Seine, from the Times up to Punch, denounced him as a libel on the civilization of the nineteenth century, as a brute who had disgraced even the brutality of the camp, when he dared, in the face of Europe, in the nineteenth century, thus to outrage the common feeling of the world. That is Haynau; but he followed the example of half the States of this Union. There, woman-whipping is the law and custom of the land. There are a hundred thousand men and women in this nation who have a right by law to whip a million and a half of women in fifteen of the Southern States. One murder makes a villain; millions a hero. To whip one woman makes a monster; but to whip millions by statute is to make a country in regard to which it is the highest wish of Kossuth that Hungary may be like her.

In view of this and similar facts, I say, there is not a word of the language which he applied to Austria that is not equally applicable to the land which imprisons Drayton and Sayres in the jails of its capital, that pursues Shadrach without mercy (a land where women are whipped by statute),--and there is not a word of all this eloquent eulogy of ourselves which is not equally applicable to Austria.

I send Fayette, therefore, to Austria. Kossuth, sheltered by the Crescent, hears of the coming of Fayette to Vienna. How his heart beats! Now, in that voice, venerable with its age, strong in the millions that wait its tones, I shall hear the voice of a deliverer. Now the heart of every down-trodden Hungarian is to leap for joy; now a sunbeam shall light up the dungeons of my old comrades,--for Fayette has entered Vienna. Listen! The first note that is borne to him down .the waters of the Danube is that of Fayette speaking to Haynau of his glorious entry into the capital of Hungary, as Kossuth speaks of the entrance of the Americans into the capital of Mexico. He listens, and every word of the eloquent Frenchman is praise of the Austrian emperor and Austrian institutions; and he says,--words Kossuth has used to the Americans,--Cling to your Constitution and your institutions. Cling to them! Let no misguided citizen ever dream of tearing down the house because there is discomfort in one of the chambers. And suppose he heard him say, Let no misguided Magyar ever dream of tearing asunder this beautiful empire of Austria, because there is discomfort in that one chamber of Hungary. What would have been his tone in answering Fayette? He would have said, Recreant! What right have you to purchase safety for France by sacrificing the people of Hungary, and by eulogizing tyrants? [Tremendous cheering.]

Just such is the message that the American slaves send back to Kossuth, Recreant! If you could not speak a free word for liberty the wide world over, why came you to this land stained and polluted by our blood? What right had you to purchase with your silence aid for Hungary, or throw the weight of your great name into the scale of our despair? Oh, no, said O'Connell, I will never tread that American strand, until she removes the curse of American slavery from her statute-book. It was well he did not. Hardly any man can stand against the temptations of our great political iniquity.

Kossuth has come here on the glorious mission of redeeming Hungary. God speed him in every step — in every honest step — that he takes to lift up the Magyar, that he may raise the nations of Europe! But, oh, if he only lift her up by using for his fulcrum the chains of the slave; if he only lift her up by using language which shall strengthen the hearts of the oppressor in this land, which shall make those who love this Union lay the flattering unction to their souls, Kossuth is an experienced man, he understands our institutions, and sees nothing to blame in them, --then perish Hungary before he succeed!

The very Congress that invited this man to our shores, and passed a resolution placing a national vessel at his service, is the very Congress that passed the Fugitive Slave Bill. He knows it. The very man who sent for the Hungarian exile, condemned to hopeless bondage hundreds who, but for that law, might have been saved. Why, if you had stood, as some of us have done, by the domestic fireside of hundreds of fugitive slaves who had been happy at the North for ten, fifteen, aye, twenty years, and had seen the utter wretchedness of those persecuted men when they felt that father or mother or wife or child must be borne away to the Southern plantation, or must make themselves exiles by going to Canada, or even to England, and reflected that these scenes are wrought by the very men who have welcomed the great Hungarian to this country, and then, when he came, that he had no words but words of eulogy,--how should you judge his spirit?

Bear with me in yet one illustration more. Men are known by the company they keep. It seems to me right to judge Kossuth so in this instance. Suppose a friend of liberty had gone across the water six months ago. Would he have sought the society of the illustrious free spirits that were the apostles of the great ideas of that country, or would he have gone to the court of the Caesar? Would he have gone to the palace of Vienna, or to Metternich? Would he have gone to the country-seat of Haynau, or to any other name recognized the world over as an apostate to principle, to humanity, to equal rights? Or would he have gone to that Kossuth, that Dembinski,--to the men who are now exiles or imprisoned throughout the length of the Austrian empire, to the graves of those who have been murdered on battlefield or in Haynau's camp? Would not their prisons have been the first scenes of his visit, that he might give his sympathy to the men who were suffering in a cause so dear to his heart? Certainly. We go where we are magnetically drawn; we cannot resist rushing into the arms of those whose hearts beat responsive to our own. If a Socialist visits Paris, he goes to Prudhomme. If an Antislavery man goes to Paris, he goes to De Broglie. As Dr. Jackson said of his lamented son, who died recently in Boston, in whatever company he went he nailed his flag high, that all men might know his principles. [Cheers.] Now, I say, that Louis Kossuth did not nail the flag of his principles high to the mast; if he had, Hangman Foote would never have invited him to Washington. The world-wide love of man, the burning enthusiasm, the hatred of all oppression, that gathered two hundred thousand living hearts in Hungary; melted them into one giant mass by the magnetism of his great nature; and hurled them like an awful thunderbolt against the throne of the Caesars,--all that has not crossed the Atlantic; if it had, the pro-slavery divines of New York --the men who say they dare not utter even a prayer for the three millions of blacks-would never have gathered around it. He will go to Washington, and to whom? To Daniel Webster and to Hangman Foote. Had he been the Kossuth of Pesth,--the Kossuth whom Gorgei betrayed,--he would have gone to the prison of Drayton and Sayres to see the men who have been made a sacrifice for the crime of loving their brother-man as they loved themselves. He would have said, No matter what your laws are, I broke the laws of Austria for the Magyar. The European who has rent parchments to rags when they stood in the way of liberty, who has trampled on laws a thousand years old when they stood in the way of humanity and justice; that man, who comes to America and goes not to the prison of Drayton and Sayres, to the court-house where the men are being tried for the Christiana riots, as our press calls them,--has lowered the tone of his spirit, and compromised that great fame which came over before him.

This is the indictment that the Abolitionists bring against him. It is not that he does not love Hungary. It is not that he is a coward and that his philanthrophy shrinks before the public opinion of America. No! We do not know that he was ever afraid of anything below God. Though no coward, he is selfish,--just as selfish as all patriotism is. He loves his own land, and to that land he is willing to sacrifice the duty he owes to truth. An advocate, said Lord Brougham, defending Queen Caroline, by the sacred duty which he owes his client, knows in the discharge of that office but one person in the world,--that client and none other. To save that client by all expedient means; to protect that client at all hazards and costs to all others, and among others to himself,--is the highest and most unquestioned of his duties; and he must not regard the alarm, the suffering, the torment, the destruction which he may bring upon any other. Now that, in another form, is Kossuth's patriotism. I love Hungary, says he; stand aside all ye other races! I will so mould my language, I will so pour out my eulogy, I will so lavish my praise, that I will save her; let other races take care of themselves.

This, then, is the criticism of the Antislavery reformer: Whoever strengthens the American Union strengthens the chain of the American slave; whoever praises the policy of this country since the Constitution began, whether in Florida or Mexico, strengthens the public opinion which supports it; whoever strengthens that opinion is a foe to the slave. Louis Kossuth has thrown at the feet of the Union party the weight of his gigantic name, and every conscience that had begun to be troubled is put to sleep: Kossuth is free from American prejudices, unbiassed and disinterested. He tells me to love the Union. So I will observe the laws; so I will banish the slave from my thoughts, as Kossuth does. Kossuth saves Hungary by subserviency to the South; I will save the Union in the same way. This is the same old principle the world round, How much truth may I sacrifice in order to save some little Zoar in which God has given me a being? How much silencing of the truth is permitted us here by God, in order that we may help him govern the world? How many noble instincts may we stifle, how many despot hearts may we comfort, to help God save America? None! [Great cheering.] No, he did not send us into the world to free the slave. He did not send Kossuth into the world to save Hungary. He sent him into the world to speak his whole truth, for the white man and for the black man; to feel as a man for his brother-man; and to speak what he felt,--then, if Hungary is saved, to join in the jubilee with which all would celebrate her salvation. [Loud cheers.] Oh, men are so ready to take upon themselves the great responsibility of doing some great work in the world! I have got to save the Union, and therefore I must return fugitive slaves. I have got to redeem Hungary, and therefore I may be an American dough-face, instead of a European patriot.

This is the verdict that history shall bring. When, hereafter, the historian is telling the story of some great man who has done service to his kind, if he be one who loved only his own race or color or country, and stopped there,--who loved a Frenchman because he was himself born in Paris; or, born in London, was ready to serve all Englishmen,--if he were one who has rendered some great service to a single nation, or loved his own race and hated all others, he shall say, This was a great man; he was the Kossuth, the Webster of his day. But when he shall dip his pen in the sunlight, to immortalize some greater spirit than that,--one whose philanthrophy, like the ocean, knew no bounds; the eagle of whose spirit, towering in its pride of place, looked down upon the earth, and saw blotted out from the mighty scene all the little lines with which man had narrowed it in, and took in every human being as a brother, and loved all races with an equal humanity; who never silenced the truth that the white man might longer trample on the black, or thought the safety of his own land cheaply bought at the price of lavish eulogies laid on the footstool of petty tyrants,--he shall dip his pen in the gorgeous hues of the sunlight and write, This was a greater man yet; he was a Garrison, an O'Connell, a Fayette. [Loud and continued cheers.]

Now, this is the exact difference which the Antislavery world recognizes in Kossuth. He is the man who has been content to borrow his tone from the atmosphere in which he moved. He has offered American patriotism the incense of his eulogy, and has by that course consented to do service to the dark spirit of American slavery. We find no fault with any expression of his gratitude; but gratitude to the administration of the country was not necessarily eulogy of all its institutions. A man may thank a benefactor without endorsing his character! He came to a land where every sixth man is a slave, and where the national banner clings to the flag-staff heavy with blood, and the lips which proclaimed the freedom of the Hungarian serf have found no occasion but for eulogy! He came to a land where the Bible is prohibited, by statute, to three millions of human beings; to whom, also, the marriage institution is a forbidden blessing,--and the eminently religious Hungarian can find no occasion but for eulogy! He came to a land where almost every village in the free States has more than one trembling fugitive who dare not tell his true name, and the great martyr for personal liberty can find no occasion but for eulogy! He came to a land, of the fundamental arrangement of whose government John Quincy Adams says: It is not in the compass of human imagination to devise a more perfect exemplification of the art of committing the lamb to the custody of the wolf, and to call whose government a democracy would be to insult the understanding of mankind, and the apostle of civil liberty sees only a glorious republic, . . great, glorious, and free, . . . the pillar of freedom; and all he prays for his own country is, that she may be as free and as happy in the establishment of the same great principle !!

He comes to a land where, according to the same indisputable authority, a knot of slave-holders give the law and prescribe the policy of the country; and the indignant foe of Austrian rule, his eyes sharpened by a tempest-tossed life, finds no occasion but for eulogy! He comes to a land where, says the same venerable statesman, the preservation, propagation, and perpetuation of slavery is the vital and animating spirit of the National Government, and where, since 1780, slavery, slave-holding, slave-breeding, and slave-trading have formed the whole foundation of the policy of the Federal Government; and the sharpened eyes of the European patriot, whose baptism of liberty was in the damps of an Austrian dungeon, sees only a glorious country, . . . great, glorious, and free; . . . a glorious republic; her glorious flag the proud ensign of man's divine origin; the asylum of oppressed humanity ; her welcome the trumpet of resurrection for down-trodden humanity throughout the world; her language the language of liberty, and therefore the language of the people of the United States. His confidence of ultimate success springs from the thought that there is a God in heaven and a people like the Americans on earth. He makes haste to declare how easy it is to read the heart of this slave-holding, slave-breeding, and slave-trading people, because it is open like Nature and unpolluted like a virgin's heart; that others may shut their ears to the cry of oppressed humanity, because they regard duties but through the glass of petty interests ! But this slave-holding and slave-trading people has that instinct of justice and generosity which is the stamp of mankind's heavenly origin; knows that it has the power to restore the law of nations to the principles of justice and right; and is willing to be as good as its power is great !!! Does the great statesman-like heart of Kossuth believe all this? If he does not, is the most devoted lover of liberty ever bound to lay on her altar the sacrifice of hypocrisy? Or was any cause ever yet strengthened by lips that belied the heart?

In his last speech at Philadelphia, he goes, for the first time, further, explains his plan, and pledges himself distinctly to silence. There are two words which one would think Kossuth had never conquered, even in his marvellous mastery of the English tongue,--slavery and slave-holding; and even here, while necessarily alluding to them, he cannot frame his lips to speak their syllables. Some one had forged the following letter to him, warning him of his nearness to the slave-holding States:-- December 23, 1851. Hon. Louis Kossuth:

Respected Sir,--It is my unpleasant duty to apprise you that the intervention or non-intervention sentiments that you have promulgated in your speeches in the city of New York, are unsuitable to the region of Pennsylvania, situated as she is on the borders of several slaveholding States; and after a conference with my distinguished uncle the Hon. John Sargent, the Hon. Horace Binney, and other distinguished counsellors, who concur with me in the sentiment, I feel, most reluctantly I assure you, that such sentiments are incendiary in their character and effect; and as the conservator of the public morals and peace of the country, having sworn to comply with the Constitution of the United States and the State of Pennsylvania, on taking upon myself the office of Attorney-General of the County of Philadelphia, I shall be obliged to bring any such sentiments to the notice of the Grand Inquest of the county for their action and consideration.

Kossuth thus comments on this letter:--

Now, such a letter, and yet a forgery, indeed, is a despicable trick; but though it is a forgery, still there is one thing which forces me to some humble remarks, precisely because I know not whence comes the blow. I am referring to these words: Your intervention or non-intervention sentiments are unsuited to the region of Pennsylvania, situated as she is on the borders of several slave-holding States. I avail myself of this opportunity to declare once more that I never did or will do anything which, in the remotest way, could interfere with the matter alluded to, nor with whatever other domestic question of your united Republic, or of a single State of it. I have declared it openly several times, and on all and every opportunity I have proved to be as good as my word. I dare say that even the pledge of the word of honor of an honest man should not be considered a sufficient security in that respect. The publicly avowed basis of my human claims, and the unavoidable logic of it would prove to be a decisive authority.

What is the ground upon which I stand before the mighty tribunal of the public opinion of the United States?

It is the sovereign right of every nation to dispose of its own domestic concerns. [Great applause.] What is it I humbly ask of the United States? It is that they may generously be pleased to protect this sovereign right of every nation against the encroaching violence of Russia. It is, therefore, eminently clear that, this being my ground, I cannot and will not meddle with any domestic question of this Republic. [Applause.] Indeed, I more and more perceive that, to speak with Hamlet, there are more things in heaven and earth than were dreamed of in my philosophy. [Laughter and applause.] But still, I will stand upright, on however slippery ground, by taking hold of that legitimate fence of not meddling in your domestic questions.

What, then, is the shadowy line by which, while he claims our sympathy and aid for Hungary, he separates the slave's claim from his own? Simply this, Hungary asks for rights which ancient charters secured to her; the slave has no charters, no parchments to show,--therefore, we ought to love and aid the Magyar; therefore, Douglass can claim nothing of Kossuth! And can the soul of Kossuth rise no higher than the level of human parchments? Or can he plead for liberty with such bated breath and whispered humbleness, that to serve his purpose he can remember always to forget the self-evident rights which God gave,--to which the slave has as much right as the noblest Magyar of them all? More than this, can he find it in his heart to strengthen by his silence, by his example, and his name, the hands of the ruthless violator of those rights; cry glorious and amen, while the black is robbed of his hard toil, of the Bible, of chastity, wife, husband, and child,--only to persuade slave-holders to aid in securing for the Magyar peasant the right to vote, and for the Magyar noble the right to legislate. The world thought his lips had been touched by a coal from the altar of the living God,--and lo! he has bargained away his very utterance, and presents himself before us thus cheaply bought and gagged!

His parallel of the non-intervention of States is not a just one. No one asks England to interfere with our slave question. But, on the other hand, she pronounces no opinion on our government in general; she does not expend herself in glowing, unqualified, and indiscriminate eulogy of our institutions, or strengthen the hands of their friends by holding them up to the world as the first hope of redemption to oppressed nations, and the fairest model of republican perfection. The same is true of Kossuth. While at home, all the world asked of him was to stand in his lot, and do gallant battle for his land and people. When he comes here, and gives the listening world his judgment of our institutions,--mingling himself thus, whether he will or no, with our great national struggle,--he owes it to truth, to liberty, and the slave, that such judgment should be a true, discriminating, and honest one. If the opinion he has pronounced be his honest judgment, what will men say of that heart whose halting sympathies allowed him to overlook a system of oppression which Wesley called the vilest the sun ever saw, and which made Jefferson tremble for his country, when he remembered that God was just ? If it be not his honest judgment, but only fawning words, uttered to gain an end, what will men say of the Jesuit who thought he owed it to Hungary to serve her, or, indeed, imagined that he could serve her, by lips that clung not to the truth? When Rome's ransom was weighing out, the insolent conqueror flung his sword into the scale against it. So at the moment when the fate of the slave hangs trembling in the balance, and all he has wherewith to weigh down the brute strength of his oppressor is the sympathy of good men and the indignant protest of the world, Kossuth, with the eyes of all nations fixed upon him, throws the weight of his great name, of his lavish and unqualified approbation into the scale of the slave-holder, crying out all the while, Non-intervention!

Truly these eyes that see no race but the Magyar, and no wrongs but those of Hungary, may be the eyes of a great Hungarian and a great patriot, but God forbid they should be the eyes of a mall or a Christian!

Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori. Every heart responds to the classic patriot, and feels that it is indeed good and honorable to die for one's country; but every true man feels likewise, with old Fletcher of Saltoun, that while he would die to serve his country, he would not do a base act to save her.

Speech delivered at the Festival commemorative of the Boston Massacre, in Faneuil Hall, March 5, 1858.

Ladies and gentlemen: I am very glad to stand here in an hour when we come together to do honor to one of the first martyrs in our Revolution. I think we sometimes tell the story of what he did with too little appreciation of how much it takes to make the first move in the cold streets of a revolutionary epoch. It is a very easy thing to sit down and read the history; it is a very easy thing to imagine what we would have done,--it is a very different thing to strike the first blow. It is a very hard thing to spring out of the ranks of common, every-day life — submission to law, recognition of established government--.and lift the first musket. The man or the dozen men who do it, deserve great, pre-eminent, indisputable places in the history of the Revolution. It is an easy thing to fight when the blood is hot; but this man whose memory we commemorate to-night stepped out of common life, every-day quiet, and lifted his arm among the very first against the government. It is only pre-eminent courage that can do this. To-day, in yonder capital of Paris, the whole government rests on a thin film of ice. A hundred men in arms in the streets would break it; that hundred men cannot be found,--a hundred men willing to risk their lives, with a cold, unmoved populace behind them. Those five men who were killed on that eventful night of the 5th of March, of whom Crispus Attucks was the leader,--they never have had their fair share of fame.

Our friend Theodore Parker said the Revolution was not born so early. I think him wrong there; it was. Emerson said the first gun heard round the world was that of Lexington. Who set the example of guns? Who taught the British soldier that he might be defeated? Who dared first to look into his eyes? Those five men! The 5th of March was the baptism of blood. The 5th of March was what made the Revolution something beside talk. Revolution always begins with the populace, never with the leaders. They argue, they resolve, they organize; it is the populace that, like the edge of the cloud, shows the lightning first. This was the lightning. I hail the 5th of March as the baptism of the Revolution into forcible resistance; without that it would have been simply a discussion of rights. I place, therefore, this Crispus Attucks in the foremost rank of the men that dared. When we talk of courage, he rises, with his dark face, in his clothes of the laborer, his head uncovered, his arm raised above him defying bayonets,--the emblem of Revolutionary violence in its dawn; and when the proper symbols are placed around the base of the statue of Washington, one corner will be filled by the colored man defying the British muskets. [Applause.]

I think it is right that we should come here and remember Crispus Attucks. It is right, because every colored man has but one thing to remember in life, and that is slavery. All races are one--they are a unit. The white race is a unit, the Caucasian race is a unit, the black race is a unit--one. There is only one great, terrible fact in regard to the colored race at the present moment,--it is that millions of it wear the chain; there is nothing for the rest of the race decent to do but to devote themselves to the breaking of that chain. [Applause.] All literature, all wealth, all patriotism, all religion, should gravitate toward emancipation. I value the triumphs of the literary genius of Dumas solely as an argument thrown into the scale of the great balance, whether the colored man is worthy of liberty. Genius is worth nothing else now with the colored man, except as helping that argument. I would have you, as your friend Dr. Rock suggested, thrifty, eloquent, industrious, successful, rich, able, only as an argument that the colored race has a right to a place side by side and equal with the white. I wish I could impress this truth on every colored man. His race to-day is on trial. The world says it merits only chains. The best thing he can do with his life, with his genius, with his wealth, with his character, is to throw them into the scale of the argument, and make pro-slavery prejudice kick the beam.

I want to say another thing. I do not believe in the argument which my learned and eloquent friend Theodore Parker has stated in regard even to the courage of colored blood. It is a hazardous thing to dare to differ with so profound a scholar, with so careful a thinker as Theodore Parker; but I cannot accept his argument and for this reason,--he says the Caucasian race, each man of it, would kill twenty men and enslave twenty more rather than be a slave ;. and thence he deduces that the colored race, which suffers slavery here, is not emphatically distinguished for courage. I take issue on that statement. There is no race in the world that has not been enslaved at one period. This very Saxon blood we boast, was enslaved for five centuries in Europe. We were slaves,--we white people. This very English blood of ours — Saxon — was the peculiar mark of slavery for five or six hundred years. The Slavonic race, of which we are a branch, is enslaved by millions to-day in Russia. The French race has been enslaved for centuries. Then add this fact,--no race, not one, ever vindicated its freedom from slavery by the sword; we did not win freedom by the sword; we did not resist, we Saxons. If you go to the catalogue of races that have actually abolished slavery by the sword, the colored race is the only one that has ever yet afforded an instance, and that is St. Domingo. [Applause.] This white race of ours did not vindicate its title to liberty by the sword. The villeins of England, who were slaves, did not get their own liberty; it was gotten for them. They did not even rise in insurrection,--they were quiet; and if in 1200 or 1300 of the Christian era, a black man had landed on the soil of England and said: This white race does n't deserve freedom; don't you see the villeins scattered through Kent, Northumberland, and Sussex? Why don't they rise and cut their masters' throats? --the Theodore Parkers of that age would have been like the Dr. Rocks of this,--they could not have answered. The only race in history that ever took the sword into their hands, and cut their chains, is the black race of St. Domingo. Let that fact go for what it is worth. The villeinage of France and England wore out by the progress of commerce, by the growth of free cities, by the education of the people, by the advancement of Christianity. So I think the slavery of the blacks will wear out. I think, therefore, that the simple and limited experiment of three centuries of black slavery is not basis enough for the argument. No; the black man may well scorn it, and say, I summon before the jury, Africa, with her savage millions, that has maintained her independence for two or three thousand years; I summon Egypt with the arts; I summon St. Domingo with the sword,--and I choose to be tried in the great company of the millions, not alone! And in that company, he may claim to have shown as much courage as any other race — full as much.

I, therefore, will never try the argument with the single illustration of American slavery. No; and yet if I did, I should be proud to have the same color with Margaret Garner ; for I know of no prouder name in the history of the nineteenth century than of that heroic mother, standing alone, defying the Democracy of thirty-one States, rising in the instinctive love of a mother superior to the low Christianity of the present age, and writing her religion and her heroism in the bloody right hand that gave her infant back to God for safe keeping. [Loud applause.] Any man might well be proud to share the color of that mother whose grave some future Plutarch or Tacitus will find, when he calls up the heroism of the nineteenth century.

My friend Mr. Nell has gathered together, in a small volume, instances enough of the heroism of colored blood, and the share it took in our Revolution, and yet he has not told half the story. I commend his book to the care and patronage of every man who loves the colored race. And not only to buy it,--that is not enough. If there is any young man who has any literary ambition, let him fill up the sketch; let him complete the picture; let him go sounding along the untrodden fields of Revolutionary anecdote, and gather up every fact touching the share his race took in that struggle. Why, the wealthiest family in Boston,--that of the Lawrences,--in their own family history,

1 A colored woman who threw her child into the Ohio River rather than to live it carried into slavery. record the fact that the father of Abbot Lawrence was the captain of a company made up entirely of colored men; and when once, in the fierce and hot valor of a forgetful moment, he rushed too far into the ranks of the enemy, and was alone, ready to be made a prisoner, he looked back to his ranks of colored men, and they charged through two lines of the enemy, rescued their captain, and made it possible for the Lawrences to exist. [Applause.] They ought to be grateful — yes, that whole wealthy family ought to be grateful to colored courage that it saved their own father from a Jersey ship-of-war, and enabled him to take his share in the Revolutionary struggle, and to be buried in the old homestead at Groton. And doubtless, if your literary zeal shall follow up the path your friend Nell has opened, you will find scarcely any name on the whole roll of Revolutionary fame that does not owe more or less to colored courage and co-operation. I commend it to your care. Never forget the part your race took in the great struggle; cherish, preserve, illustrate it. Compel the white man to write your names, not as they have written them in Connecticut, at the bottom of the rest, with a line between, negro-pew fashion, but make them write them on the same marble and in the same line. The time will yet come when we will, as Caleb Cushing says, drag this Massachusetts Legislature at our heels, and they shall pay for a monument to Attucks. [Loud cheers, and cries of Good. ] It will be but the magnanimous atonement for the Injury and forgetfulness of so many years. They owe it to him, and they shall yet pay it. You and I, faithful to our trust, will see to it. Our fathers were honest and grateful enough to bury him from beneath these very walls. John Hancock did himself the honor, from his own balcony in

Plea before a Committee of the Massachusetts Legislature, March 16, 1855.

I have not been able, Mr. Chairman, to attend any of the hearings of this Committee, and therefore I cannot be said to know accurately the ground taken by those who have supported the proposition that the gallows should be retained; but I presume I know it in general, and therefore, a general reply will not wander far from the points which the committee would like to have treated. I have always found that before the House of Representatives this subject had, in fact, but two points of difficulty, and, indeed, one was of far more importance to the committee than the other. The first point is, the authority for capital punishment; and the second, the necessity or expediency of preserving it. I will say a few words on both.

In the first place, Mr. Chairman, what is the object of all punishment, in a civil community? Of course, it is not to revenge any act committed. The idea of revenge is to be separated from the idea of punishment, when we speak of capital punishment, or any other punishment, in civil society. Neither can it be said that punishment is the penalty of sin, properly speaking; that is sin in the eye of God, where an individual — a conscious, responsible individual — commits a wrong act, with a wrong motive. Society has nothing to do with motive; society punishes acts. One man, for instance, may commit murder, and in reality, and in the sight of God, may not commit as much sin as another person who has merely stolen; because we all know that sin, moral guilt, is made up of two elements,--the light that the individual had, and the criminal wish that he had to violate that light. God alone can know what light a man has in his own conscience. Strictly speaking, therefore, the word punishment ought never to be used in this connection. Society does not, in fact, punish as we usually make use of that term. Punishment belongs only to that Being who can fathom the heart, and find out motives.

This is a more important principle than it at first appears from this consideration. Many men approach this subject with the idea that there is some peculiar religious responsibility connected with it. Dr. Cheever, in his work on capital punishment, has a leading train of thought to the effect that the land is stained with blood, in the phrase of the Old Testament, and that society has got something to do to free tile nation from the guilt of blood; but our ideas of civil government are entirely different from this. There are two objects that society has in inflicting penalties,--that is the proper word, not punishment. According to Lord Brougham in his letter to Lord Lyndhurst on this very topic, these objects are,--first, to prevent the individual offender from ever repeating his offence; and second, to deter others from imitating his offence. The primary object of all government is protection,--protection to persons and property. That protection is to be gained in two ways,--by taking the individual murderer, or the individual thief, and by putting him to death, or shutting him up, to prevent his recommitting his offence; and by so arranging the penalty on that man as to deter others from imitating his example.

In that definition, Mr. Chairman, have I not included the whole object of penalty in the eye of civil government? You observe that this must be the whole object. For instance,--a man who undertakes to commit murder, but does not do it, is guilty of murder in the eye of God. If I load a pistol and fire it at a man, and miss him, I am a murderer in the eye of God; I am not a murderer in the eye of society. Society looks upon the act, not upon the intention or motive of the individual; and, therefore, only that Being who fathoms motives, who lets down the plummet of His infinite knowledge into the complex machinery of the human heart, and learns how much good has been resisted, how much education has been smothered,--only He can punish.

If I am right in this, the only things left are restraint of the specific individual culprit, and restraint by deter. ring imitators. That is the object of penalties. Well, then, we come to the penalty of the gallows,--the taking away of life. In the first place,--to look at it abstractly,--is it necessary in order to restrain the murderer, or to deter others from imitating him? It manifestly is not necessary in order to restrain the murderer; because society is now so settled in its arrangements, so perfectly stereotyped in its shape and form, that you can put a man between four walls and keep him there his whole life. Massachusetts can build prisons strong enough to keep a man, and enact statutes strong enough to prevent him from being pardoned out. No man will pretend before this Committee that that part of the object of penalty which would prevent the man from repeating his offence obliges you to take his life. You can shut him up just as securely in a prison as in a grave. It is not necessary, then, to restrain the criminal; nobody pretends it.

Is it necessary for the simple purpose of deterring others from like offences? Will the taking of the man's life deter others from following in his steps? That is the only question that remains.

When we look at the gallows — what is it? It is the taking of human life. There are three questions which present themselves in connection with this subject: 1. Have we a right to take it? 2. Are we obliged to take it. 3. Does it do any good to take it? In other words,--the right, the obligation, and the necessity.

With regard to the matter of right. If the Massachusetts Declaration of Rights is of any authority in this hall, if the first page of your Constitution is of any authority here,--then it would be hard to show where you get the power to take life. The body politic, says the Preamble to the Constitution, is formed by a voluntary association of individuals; it is a social compact by which the whole people covenants with each citizen, and each citizen with the whole people. That is the republican theory of government; it is the theory of this country, as you know, ever since the Declaration of Independence. It is a compact between individuals to be governed in a certain form. Society, therefore, can have no rights higher than those the individual has to give to it. If you will read the Declaration of Rights of the Massachusetts Constitution, you will see that our form of government is a partnership of the individuals composing the body politic, and of course, a partnership cannot have any property except what the individual members give to it. Now an individual man has no right over his own life,--suicide is sin. If government is a compact, a partnership of rights which we individually surrender, where do you get the right to take life? The parties that make the compact have not got it, and therefore they cannot give it to the government. Your legislature, according to that Constitution, has no rights except what the people have given them. The people have no right to take their own lives, and of course they cannot give you the right to take their lives. If your Constitution is correct, therefore, you have no right to take life. I do not say the Constitution is right. I know there are theories which repudiate the idea of compact, and claim that government derives its authority directly from God. Your Constitution says that government is a compact among the people; and a government founded on that basis cannot have the right to take life, unless the individual has the right to take his own,--unless suicide is justifiable. The reverend gentlemen who have appeared before you in opposition to the petitioners, would not allow for a moment that I have the right to commit suicide; but if I have not the right to take my own life, how can I give that right to Governor Gardner, or to a jury of twelve men?

Beccaria, Dr. Rush, and all the most eminent writers on this subject deny the right of society to take life, on the ground that it conflicts with the republican form of government. These gentlemen escape from this by throwing overboard the whole theory of American society. They say society is not a compact. They upset the Declaration of Independence and the Massachusetts Constitution, and maintain that government is derived from God; and in that way they get the idea of capital punishment from the Bible: for you cannot get it any where else,--it must be got from the Bible, if got at all. Overthrowing the Massachusetts Constitution, they erect you into a government by the ordinance of God. It is in fact the old divine right to govern, and having introduced that theory into American society, they give you the right to take life. And when they give you this right, they give it to you in a Hebrew verse of the Old Testament, which, they say, not only confers the right, but actually enjoins it as an obligation, blood for blood!

They claim that this question lies entirely outside of the province of usual legislation. That is a very suspicious claim, to begin with. You are asked to give your support to a law which avowedly transcends your Constitution, on the ground that it belongs to the theory of Christianity. But who says this is a Christian government? It recognizes the Jew, the Mohammedan, or anybody else, as a voter and entitled to an equality of right. I do not say, gentlemen, that the spirit of Christianity does not permeate its laws; I simply say, this government does not recognize Christianity as an essential characteristic of its component parts.

You come now to the Bible. You come now to this verse of the Old Testament; and upon this verse hangs the whole theory of government, the whole theory of this legislation on capital punishment. I want you to bear in mind these observations, because it shows you that the thing claimed stands outside of the Constitution, outside of the whole theory of American government,--it is peculiar, essential, unique. We come, then, to that verse. It is an obligation, they say: Whosoever sheddeth man's blood, by man shall his blood be shed. Let us suppose, gentlemen, to begin with, that it is a command. We will not say that we are Christians and not Jews, and that this was addressed, in the first place, to Jews and not to Christians. Who can show that this is a command to Christians? It is a command to the Jewish nation, so far as we know. But it is contended that this command stands behind the Jewish nation, and is addressed to the whole race, represented by Noah. Suppose we waive aside our objection, and consider it as a covenant with the race, through Noah.

If this is a covenant, if it is a law of God, if it is addressed to us as the law of God,--it must be obeyed, fully, entirely obeyed; no man has a right to take exceptions to it. If it is the law of God, Mr. Chairman, you and I, and this government, and every individual in it must obey it in its letter. We have no right to make changes in it. If we have a right to make changes in the law of God, how much change may we make? Change it a half; two thirds? No; the rule is, you cannot change it a tittle. It is to be obeyed; and it is to be obeyed wholly; it is to be obeyed in its full spirit, to the extent of it. Is not that proper? The opponents of capital punishment, gentlemen, are perfectly willing to obey this statute, with the gentlemen who support the gallows, if they will obey it to the letter, entirely. How long could any legislature that obeyed that command, in its full spirit, sit in any Christian country? Let us see.

In the first place, you will remark that this is but a single line of Hebrew text. If you will look into our friend Spear's book, or Dr. Cheever's book, or any book on this subject, on either side, you will find that there are as many as twelve different interpretations of it. No two of the great lights of Oriental learning and the Hebrew language have been able to agree upon an interpretation. One says that it means one thing, and another, another thing; and from Calvin and Luther down to our own day, there has been no unanimous agreement among scholars as to the meaning of this sentence. Is it not rather singular, gentlemen, that you should be asked to upset the whole theory of the American Constitution, to support a law which it is confessed transcends the American idea of the power of government, that you should be asked to take a right-one of the most doubtful ever exercised, even if it should appear to have existed in any human government — on the faith of a single line of a dead language, three thousand years old, about the meaning of which no two scholars agree? If Goa meant to issue a command to last for all time,--a command which was so imperative that all governments, in all circumstances, were to be obliged to obey it,--would He not have stated it so that its meaning might be plainly understood? Some say it means whatsoever. Dr. Kraitsir, one of the most eminent living philologists in the world, undertook to show in his lectures, only two years ago, that it only forbids cannibalism,--the eating of men; and perhaps, on a question of language, there is no single name in all Christendom that has the weight of Dr. Kraitsir at the present moment.

Whosoever sheds man's blood, his blood shall be shed. That is the whole sentence; by man is an interpolation. That is the whole literal interpretation of the words; we have got to make out the rest. Some say it is a prophecy, Whosoever taketh the sword, shall perish by the sword; and so of all the different meanings. I do not go into them, because it is utterly immaterial to my argument which is the best. The simple fact that the most eminent Oriental scholars have never been able to agree upon an interpretation, is enough for me. Is it not singular, I say, that so transcendent an act of legislation as breaking into the bloody house of life, as Shakspeare writes,--the taking of human life,--should be left to hang on a doubtful sentence, in a dead language, more than three thousand years old? Why, gentlemen, if a doctrine is of importance in the Bible, it is spread over many pages; it shines out in parable; it is put prominently forward in exhortation ; it is given in one way and then in another; first by one writer and then by another,--but here is this single sentence, nothing else; we have got to hang on this; we cannot find it anywhere else. Our Saviour says, reiterating the great command, Thou shalt not kill ; but here is an exception, according to this theory. Get rid of this sentence, and there is no trouble anywhere else in the Bible. Now, I say, that if that was a command to control all governments, to trample under foot all circumstances, it would be natural to conclude that God would have expressed it more clearly.

But, leaving this point, to whom is this command addressed? Is it to governments? No, gentlemen, it is addressed to individuals. When God spoke to Noah, there was no government. The address was to individuals, and it was so interpreted for more than fifteen hundred years. It was addressed to each individual man; and when the Jews were organized into a nation, they found this original command, according to this interpretation, resting on each man, to kill whoever had killed his nearest relative. You know that all through the Pentateuch you have frequent references to the old right, before government existed, of each man to kill the person who had taken the life of his nearest of kin. This command then is addressed to individuals,--it is a command to the nearest of kin to kill whoever slays his relative. If this is a command of God, it is addressed to you and to me. Suppose that Mr. Rufus Choate, or some other eminent lawyer, should procure the acquittal of a murderer, and that the brother of the person murdered should seek out and shoot down the murderer; and when he is brought before the court for sentence, suppose that he should say to the judge: Whosoever sheddeth man's blood, by man shall his blood be shed. Every pulpit in Massachusetts interprets that as a command of God. I believe that it is a command of God addressed to individuals. God has never taken it back. It is addressed to me, then, just as much as to Noah; there is no time with the Almighty. He is speaking that seatence now just as much as in the time of Noah. You say the jury had acquitted the man; but what are the jury to me? I know he was guilty. God's command to me is that I should kill him; I have killed him. Take my life if you dare! You are disobeying the divine commandment! Suppose he should say this, how would you meet it? Where could you impeach his argument upon the doctrine maintained here?

That is a command addressed to every individual. There was no sheriff then; no county courts; no government; no legislation. There were but six or seven men on the face of the earth, and God promulgated a law. It was addressed to every human being, and it was to be obeyed. It is universally recognized in the Old Testament in the sense I have stated, and it was exercised in that sense for fifteen hundred years. Where is the exception, gentlemen, to that? If the gentlemen who have appeared before you against the abolition of the death penalty will stand on that statute, so will we. Let us see what sort of a government you will produce. Whenever a man has taken life, the nearest of kin of the murdered person will avenge him, according to his own idea, and government has no right to interfere. Whosoever sheddeth man's blood, by man shall his blood be shed. Not whosoever means to shed; not whosoever maliciously sheddeth; sheddeth with malice aforethought, malice prepense; --but whosoever sheddeth. Now we make a distinction,--we say the man who kills in hot blood, or unawares, is guilty only of manslaughter; we must have malice aforethought to constitute the crime of murder. We draw the line; in the time of Noah it was not drawn. Is this legislature ready to obey this statute, and annul the distinction between murder and manslaughter? Is it ready to make it the law of the Commonwealth, that whosoever takes life, no matter how, shall be hanged by the neck until he is dead?

Do not say I am quibbling. I will show you I am not. Look in the thirty-fifth of Numbers, and you will observe that Moses makes a peculiar institution. He sets apart six cities of refuge. What are they for? Whoever commits murder with malice prepense, with design, is to be killed. Whoever smites a mall unawares, that he die, he has a right to fly into a city of refuge, and stay there a year and a day, or until the death of the High Priest; and provided he stays there during that period, the nearest of kin cannot kill him. These six cities shall be a refuge, both for the children of Israel, and for the stranger, and for the sojourner among them; that every one that killeth any person unawares may flee thither. (Num. XXXV. 15.) That was the only restraint which Moses dared to put upon the right of the nearest of kin to take the life of anybody who had killed his relative, whether he took it by design or not. The murderer, you will observe, by the fifth chapter of Numbers, is to be put to death, whether he gets to the city of refuge or not; but the man who has committed manslaughter is not to be killed, provided he stay in the city of refuge a year and a day. Now, what does that show? It shows two things,--in the first place, that, prior to Moses' making that statute in Numbers, the nearest of kin took the life of anybody who killed his relative; and in the second place, it shows, what I have stated to you, that there is no distinction in this passage between murder and manslaughter. Moses institutes a distinction, and says that if a man has committed homicide,--has killed a man unawares,--and shall go to a city of refuge, and shall stay in this city a year and a day, he is not to be punished. The two statutes interpret each other. That second statute, which makes a limitation on the first, shows what the first meant, and shows that Moses thought that, according to this passage in Genesis, the blood of the murderer (whether the act were committed with malice aforethought or not) should be taken by the nearest of kin of the murdered person. Gentlemen, that is what a lawyer would call an interpretation from contemporaneous practice. Here is the practice of fifteen hundred years under that statute, and the man who commits murder, with aforethought or unawares, is to be slain by the nearest of kin of the murdered man. If that was the original command, obey it. We have only the statute of Genesis; we have no thirty-fifth chapter of Numbers, with its limitation,--that was addressed to the Jews. We have no cities of refuge. A man cannot go to Worcester or Salem, and stay there a year, by way of punishment, or atonement for his offence. We have not the exception; we have only the statute.

Now, gentlemen, are the reverend gentlemen willing to say that you shall annul the distinction between murder and manslaughter in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts,--that if a man kills another unintentionally, without malice, he shall be punished with death, under the covenant with Noah? If they will not, what right have they to come here and tell you to obey that statute? If that is a statute of God, what right have they to make exceptions?

Dr. Cheever avoids this dilemma, and how? He allows that this command was addressed to individuals. He allows that it cannot be obeyed by individuals now, --that it would derange all society, upset all government; and what does he say? He says, we cannot obey the statute as it was originally given; because there is such an entire change of circumstances since the time of Noah. Indeed! But Dr. Cheever can interpolate circumstances into the law of God; and if he can, cannot we? If you are going to open a door in the statute for the great procession of circumstances in a period of nineteen centuries to pass through, can you not open it wide enough to carry the gallows out? If circumstances have changed so much since this command was delivered, that it is not safe for an individual to kill the murderer, perhaps they have changed so much that you and I can get rid of the gallows altogether.

Suppose you had made a statute for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts; suppose you had passed the Maine Liquor Law, and six months afterwards the authorities in some town in the Commonwealth should refuse to execute it, should make exceptions to it, and when they were remonstrated with they should say, Yes, certainly, those were the circumstances in March, but in November they have changed, and we are going to change the statute, the legislature would undoubtedly like to have it done, --what would you think of their reasoning?

If this is a statute at all, it is a statute until God alters it. If one man has a right to say that circumstances have dispensed with one half of it, another individual has a right to say that circumstances have dispensed with it altogether. Mr. Jefferson, you know, cut out all the parts of the New Testament to which he objected, and said of the remainder, This is my New Testament. There was no objection to it, except that different people might take out different parts, and there would be no New Testament left. Just so with Dr. Cheever. Circumstances have not dispensed with the statute, Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God, Thou shalt love thy neighbor; none of the ten commandments are dispensed with,--how is it that circumstances have dispensed with one half of this statute?

In the third place, gentlemen, it is a singular fact, that if this be the law, Whosoever sheddeth man's blood, by man shall his blood be shed, it has never been obeyed. If this be the meaning of the statute, that every civil government that exists is bound to kill every human being who has taken life, it has never been obeyed. It is a strong argument against that interpretation, that practice has never conformed to it. Moses took the life of an Egyptian; God did not order him to be killed. According to this statute, Moses ought to have been killed. David killed Uriah; David was not killed. So you can find in various parts of the Old Testament, accounts of several ancient worthies who took life,--took it, too, in a way that in modern society would subject them to punishment; yet they were not punished, though, according to this statute, they ought to have been put to death.

Then look at another point. Did you ever hear of a civil government that did not locate in some portion of its arrangements the pardoning power? Did you ever hear of a government that did not give either the king, or the legislature, or the governor, or the council, or somebody, the pardoning power? If a jury shall condemn a man to death, the governor may interpose and save his life. Where does he get this power under this statute? God does not say, Whosoever sheddeth man's blood, by man shall his blood be shed, provided the governor does not pardon him, --that proviso is not there. If this is a statute of the most high God, you have got to obey it, obey it literally; and every man who is convicted of homicide is to be punished capitally. No considerations of mercy, no pity for his family, no consideration of darkness of mind, his want of education, ought to make him a fit subject for pardon. There is no proviso for pardon in this statute; what right, then, has the Governor of Massachusetts to exercise such a power on the theory of these gentlemen?

You perceive the force of my argument, gentlemen of the Committee. The upholders of capital punishment say that inside of this book there is a command to keep up the gallows. We respectfully reply: Take the statute in this book; construe it as you would any other law, and obey it,--and if you will obey it in that way, we are willing the government shall try the experiment. But we are not willing that anybody should take out as much as he pleases, and leave the rest as binding upon us. If this is a law of God, Whosoever sheddeth man's blood, by man shall his blood be shed, --if that is the whole of it,--you have no right to give Governor Gardner the pardoning power, because God does not recognize that power. There was an old lawyer who used to say that he could make a flaw in any statute large enough to drive a coach through. How large a flaw must you make in this statute before you can get modern government under it? If it is a statute, it means all I have said; if it is not a statute, it means nothing. You are to choose between one horn of the dilemma or another. If you want a government based on Noah, take it; but don't throw it in our faces when we undertake to erect a government on the principles of modern experience, that we are disobeying a divine command in its full letter and spirit. Do not throw it in our faces for a single item, and then refuse to conform to it when it goes against yourselves. Then, again, if this verse is a binding statute, all the verses are. Here is the covenant with Noah, and this is one of the articles of that covenant, But flesh, with the life thereof, which is the blood thereof, shall ye not eat. （Gen. IX. 4.) This has always been interpreted to prescribe a certain method of killing meat to be eaten. Even at this day, the Jews of the city of New York will not buy meat in the common markets of the city, because they think it transcends that command,--that it is not properly blooded. They obey that law to the very letter. Did you ever hear of a Christian, who comes here with the sixth verse of this chapter written all over him, and maintains that God commands you to hang,--did you ever know that he made any particular inquiries in the market as to whether he was obeying the fourth verse? No, gentlemen, he is a Jew as to the gallows; he is a Christian as to his pork.

But that fourth verse is a more important one than the sixth, after all. If you turn over to that chapter in Acts, where the Apostles give their general directions to Christians, you will see that they reiterate the fourth verse: For it seemed good to the Holy Ghost, and to us, to lay upon you no greater burden than these necessary things: that ye abstain from meats offered to idols, and from blood, and from things strangled, etc. (Acts XV. 28, 29.) That command of the fourth verse has been reiterated, but not the sixth. The Apostle did not say, when they were making that general law for all Christendom, It seemed good to the Holy Ghost and to us to command you that you obey this statute: Whosoever sheddeth man's blood, by man shall his blood be shed. They were yet to be particular how their meat was killed; that has been reiterated, but no Christian obeys it; but this sixth verse has never been reiterated, yet it is so important, according to these gentlemen, that if you should dare to disobey it, the Commonwealth would go to pieces! If this is a covenant, one part is just as obligatory as another; yet you would obey the sixth verse, and set at nought the fourth! Suppose the Supreme Court should say of a law passed by this legislature, It is all Constitutional we admit; but we shall obey one half of it, and not the other. Suppose an individual should say so,--what should you think of it?

What results from these considerations? Why, this results,--that nobody can obey that statute at the present moment, and no civil government does; and the government that should undertake to do it for one hour, would be hurled into oblivion the next, by the aroused indignation of the nineteenth century. Constitute yourselves a government; make no distinction between manslaughter and murder; declare that the individual shall have the right to take the life of the person who kills his nearest relative; give the governor no right to pardon,--and see how long such a government would stand. And yet I contend that no man who interprets that statute. by the common rules of evidence and contemporary practice, can find any of the merciful provisions of modern government in it. I have shown you what that statute was, as practised for fifteen hundred years; and Moses himself did not dare to say that the nearest of kin should not kill the man who had committed manslaughter. He instituted cities of refuge, where the individual offender should be safe; but if he left the city, he was liable to be killed. I contend, gentlemen, that in this issue between the parties, it is we who are upholding the Old Testament, not those who defend the gallows. We say, God did not mean to prescribe a law for civil government in all time,--that was not his object; or, if he did, this was permissive merely, you may take life, if you wish to.

This is my proposition, gentlemen: Grant that to be a statute; if it is a statute, interpret it like any other statute; and when you have done that, then we will say these gentlemen are sincere and consistent, if they sup. port and obey it. But until they do, we are not willing to have them interpolate as much as they choose into it, and then require us to obey it. If you will show me a man who rigidly obeys the other verses of the covenant, then I will show you a man who really supports the gallows because he thinks the sixth verse commands it; but until you do, I shall think the opponents of the abolition of the death penalty are influenced by other motives than those which appear.

Now, gentlemen, I shall leave this subject in a moment; but allow me to say to you, that this statute is represented as a warrant from Almighty God, commanding all governments, for all time, to inflict the penalty of death upon every man who takes life. There is only this single verse, in language of an uncertain tenor, and it has all the difficulties about it I have named. I ask you, in all sincerity, if any county sheriff would hang one man on a writ as ambiguous as that? You know he would not; and yet governments are to hang to all time, and thousands are to die, upon the authority of a statute so uncertain in its meaning that no sheriff would hang an individual man on a precept so equivocal, and so much surrounded with difficulties! If men are to come here and propound it as a statute sounding down to us from Sinai, and before Sinai, then it is a statute that we must put our hands on our lips, and our lips in the dust, and obey to the letter. We have no right to reject one word and take the next; there is no trifling to be done with it.

Gentlemen, we have now dismissed the subject of obligation. It is unnecessary to say,,after this, that I do not believe in the obligation. If society can get permission to take life from this text, it is the most that it can get; it is no command, no continuing command. But, mark you, even that permission your Constitution does not allow you to use! Your Constitution does not even recognize it as a permission; because, if it is, it is a per. mission to commit suicide. You have got to upset the American idea of government before you can even exercise it as a permission. Mr. Rantoul, in one of his exceedingly able reports on this subject, fourteen years ago, placed this before the legislature in the most unanswerable light. You must argue down the American idea of government before you can put down the argument which forbids the taking of human life. There is great difficulty here. You have got to ignore the American theory and American history. You have got to say of that Declaration of Rights, It is a lie! There is something deeper than compact. We do not sit under a compact. We sit under an arrangement which God limits,--the height and depth and breadth of which He has defined, not the Constitution. This is not the republican theory of government, gentlemen; but I have no quarrel with it,--it may be so. But you sit here under the Constitution of Massachusetts, and if that Constitution is right, you have got no powers except what the people give you. When, gentlemen, did the law recognize that I have the right to take my own life? Never. Then, under your idea of compact, you have no right to take my life. If your Constitution is a sound, logical instrument, the very first statute that hung a man on the gallows was a violation of the Constitution of Massachusetts; for it undertook to assume over that man's life a power which he did not himself possess, and which he could not, therefore, delegate to the State; and the Constitution says that the government could have no right except what that man gave it,--The body politic is formed by a voluntary association of individuals; it is a social compact by which the whole people covenants with each citizen, and each citizen with the whole people. Now, will any man undertake to show me how any government founded upon that as its cornerstone can claim the right to take life, unless the individual has a right to take his own life,--unless suicide be justifiable? The defenders of the gallows all feel the necessity of meeting this objection, and they uniformly do it by rejecting the idea of compact. They claim that government is something else,--that you get your rights somewhere else than from a compact. Dr. Cheever and other writers on the same side undertake to say that this idea of compact is all a mistake; that it was derived from the French infidelity of the eighteenth century. They ignore it entirely, and they have a right to, for they are only writing books. But you cannot; for you are sitting here as a legislature, and must respect the Constitution you have sworn to support.

Let us look at another argument of Dr. Cheever. He says society gets the right to take life as the individual gets the right of self-defence. What is the principle of the law.? The principle of the law is this: If a man is going to take your life, you have no right to take his immediately; you must retreat to the wall. The rule of the common law says: You must retreat until you can retreat no farther; and then, when you must either die or kill him, you may kill him; but if you kill him at once, without retreating as far as you can, you are guilty of manslaughter. Now, if Dr. Cheever is going to get the right from this principle just alluded to, then society is bound to show, not that taking life is a good thing, but that it is an absolutely necessary thing. Society is bound to show that, in conformity with this rule, she has retreated to the wall,--that is, done everything she could before taking the life of the murderer. Society has got to show, if Dr. Cheever's theory is correct, that, like the individual, before she raised her hand, she retreated as far as she could,--she ran and hid herself, got out of the way, and when she could do nothing else, then she took the life of the individual. But now, how is it? Who are the men that are hung? Are they the rich, the educated, the men that are cared for by society? No, that is not the class that supplies the harvest for the gallows. The harvest of the gallows is reaped from the poor, the ignorant, the friendless,--the men who, in the touching language of Charles Lamb, are never brought up, but dragged up; who never knew what it was to have a mother, to have education, moral restraint. They have been left on the highways, vicious, drunken, neglected. Society cast them off. She never extended over them a single gentle care; but the first time this crop of human passion, the growth of which she never checked, manifests itself,--the first time that ill-regulated being puts forth his hand to do an act of violence, society puts forth her hand to his throat, and strangles him! Has society done her duty? Could the intelligence, the moral sense, and the religion of Massachusetts go up and stand by the side of that poor unfortunate negro who was the last man executed in this Commonwealth, and say that they had done their duty by him? He had passed his life in scenes of vice; he had never known what it was to have a human being speak to him in a tone of sympathy. Had society done her duty? Had she retreated to the wall? He never landed in our city but the harpies of licentiousness and drink beset him, and the churches never rose up in their majesty to forbid it. Steeped to the lips in vice for thirty years, when society found him guilty of an act of violence, the natural result of such a life, did society take him and say, God gave this man to me an innocent soul, and I have let him grow up into this monster, and now I will take him and restrain him; I will throw around him moral influences, and see if I cannot make a human being of him? Did society retreat to the wall? Did she try to save that man? No; she inflicted on him the severest punishment,--she took away his life. Society is an instrument of good, said one of your members a few days ago. Then she is bound to educate the man thrown into her hands.

This is a very broad theory, that society gets the right to hang, as the individual gets the right to defend himself. Suppose she does; there are certain principles which limit this right, to which she is bound. Besides, when society has got the man completely in her power, what is she to do with him? Suppose a man attacks me to-day; according to Dr. Cheever, I have the right to take his life. But the law says: No; if you can restrain him, you must do so, and not kill him. Society has got the murderer within four walls; he never can do any more harm. You can put him in a jail from whence he can never escape; where he can never see the face of his kind again. Has society any need to take that man's life to protect herself? Has she retreated to the wall? If society has only the right that the individual has, she has no right to inflict the penalty of death, because she can effectually restrain the individual from ever again committing his offence. Suppose a man should attempt to kill me in the street, and I should take his life, and when I was brought before Chief-Justice Shaw, and asked how I killed him, I should say: I overcame him; I threw him on the sidewalk; I bound him hand and foot; and then I killed him, --would that be justifiable? No, I should be imprisoned for manslaughter. Society takes the murderer; she shuts him up in jail; she keeps him ninety days, or longer; she tries him before twelve men; and then, having him utterly, irremediably in her power, she hangs him; and then she turns round and tells you, I have only the right of the individual; and the common law retorts upon her: You had no right to take that man's life; you might have restrained him, if you would, and you had no right to kill him.

As I said at the beginning, there are two objects of penalty,--first, to restrain the offender from repeating his offence; and second, to deter other people from imitating it. Now, if the object be simply to prevent the individual from repeating the offence, he cannot repeat it if he is shut up in prison. You can keep him there; you can deny to the governor the power to pardon such persons. You can declare, as O'Sullivan proposes, that such persons shall not be pardoned except by the two-thirds vote of three successive legislatures. You can keep them in prison, if you choose. Nobody can say that a million of men and women, with one poor, hapless man in chains, are so afraid of him that they are obliged to take his life in order to prevent the offence. No, gentlemen, nobody pretends it. The only claim now is, that it is necessary, in order to prevent other men from repeating it.

Here is another point. If this idea of hanging men, for example, is correct, then why do you not make your executions as public as possible? Why do you not hang men at the centre of the Common? Our fathers did it. They hung their people under the great tree. They hung them for example, and of course they wished everybody to see it. They hung men upon the Neck, and crowds went out to see it. If example is the object, the sight of punishment would seem to be essential to its full effect. Why, Homer tells us, two thousand years ago, that a thing seen has double the weight of a thing heard. Everybody knows that a child will recollect what he sees ten times as well as what he hears. You know that in old times (not to make a laugh of it), in Connecticut, they used to take the children to the line of the town, and there give them a whipping, in order that they might remember the bounds of their township by that spot. Now, there are fourteen States in the Union that have made executions private, and in England they are private. Only a few men — some twenty or thirty or fifty--are allowed to witness them. Mark you, the whole claim of the value of executions now lies in their example; yet it is found that out of one hundred and sixty-seven persons executed in England within a certain limit of time, one hundred and sixty-four had witnessed executions! All the crimes of the world have been found at the foot of the gallows. O'Sullivan has recorded six or eight cases of persons who left the gallows to go home and commit the same offence, in the same way. In consequence of these executions, a sort of mania for killing arises. You know how it has been in other cases,--what a mania there was at one time for shooting Louis Phillippe, and at another for intruding on Queen Victoria. It takes possession of people. Society has learned that to witness executions develops a certain instinct for blood which is dangerous; and so, in many countries, the government does not permit it.

There is another singular thing about this punishment. Here is an ordinance of God, of the sublimest authority in the universe (according to the upholders of capital punishment), commanding us to execute our fellow-men; and yet, in all civilized society, Mr. Chairman, the man who executes that law — the hangmanis not esteemed fit for decent society. In Spain, the man who has hung another runs out of the city in disgrace, and if he were to appear again, the mob would tear him in pieces. To call a man a hangman is the greatest insult you can cast upon him.

Dr. Beecher (interrupting).--I suppose that is because he has touched sin and been polluted.

Mr. Phillips.--But the mob does not pelt the clergy-. man who takes the man's hand only the moment before he is executed! [This retort excited great merriment, the audience loudly applauding.]

No, Mr. Chairman, it is a very remarkable circumstance that in all time the man who did his duty in obeying this statute has been infamous.

Then here is another very important fact. That statute--one line of which, according to these gentlemen, has sufficient vitality to cover all space and time — is so horrid you cannot permit the world to look at it. It demoralizes society. The reason given for hiding the gallows was, that its influence was demoralizing; it was found to be the universal testimony that executions were great promoters of crime. The London police never had so much to do as when there was an execution. If example is the object, why certainly the example of the actual thing at the moment ought to have prevented people from committing the same offence. Yet you remember the very remarkable case of the widow of a forger in London, who begged her husband's body of the executioner and took it home; and the police, suspecting the parties, entered the house and found forged notes concealed in the very mouth of the corpse! The wife and the other parties were engaged in the same crime, and to conceal it, put into the mouth of the corpse the evidence of their guilt! And such cases are not at all uncommon, though this one may be most remarkable in its circumstances. This was the reason why executions were made private.

Let me cite high authority on this point. Six or seven years ago Lord Brougham addressed a letter to Lord Lyndhurst. Lord Lyndhurst had said that one of the principal reasons for resorting to capital punishment was the necessity of deterring others by punishing the criminal severely. Lord Brougham replies: You, sir, and myself have been well acquainted with criminal jurisprudence and the execution of criminal law in England. I appeal to you, and to every member of the profession familiar with criminal law, whether the idea of deterring others from committing offences by punishing the offender severely, is not found, in practice, to be utterly unsound. It has no such effect whatever.

Lord Brougham goes on to say: It may be that I am Quixotic, but if government has no other way of protecting society against the repetition of offences except by punishing the offender severely, then government is a failure. ... In my opinion, he adds, the only protection government has is this: Take possession of the offender, and subject him to moral restraint. Make your jail a moral hospital; make the man over again, if you can,--and in that way you protect society from that man henceforth. Take the rest of the community and educate them, and in that way you protect society from them, and in no other. I am not quoting a morbid philanthropist or a mere sentimentalist, but a cool, hard lawyer, who, after many years of practice and ample opportunities for observation, comes to the conclusion that the gallows, and penal legislation of all kinds, if it has no other object than the example of punishment, is a failure, and that there is no remedy but education. As Bulwer has well said: Society has erected the gallows at the end of the lane, instead of guide-posts and direction-boards at the beginning.

There is, therefore, gentlemen, no reason, either on the ground of keeping the offender from repeating his offence, or in the influence of the example, for the gallows; there is no necessity for it. Experience proves that there is not.

Gentlemen, I would not weary you with details; but take Rantoul's reports, and you will find my statement fully confirmed. It is proved by English history that just so fast as you take the death-penalty from a crime, the crime diminishes. Experience is all that way, and not the other. I hold that you cannot oblige us to show that taking away the gallows is better than to keep it. It is acknowledged that as regards the prevention of crime the gallows is a failure. You do not prevent crime by hanging the criminal,--it increases. Attorney-General Austin asked the legislature, in a report made, I think, in 1843, to give up capital punishment, because it did not restrain murder. Remember, this is Attorney-General Austin,--a man not suspected of any exceeding humanity, a man who did not look at this subject from any sentimental point of view, but simply as a lawyer. Here is what he said:--

Whether the punishment of death should be abolished in any of the few cases to which it is now applied [the capital penalty of robbery and burglary had been done away with in 1839] has often been a subject of legislative inquiry. It does not belong to me to enter upon an argument that is nearly exhausted; but I deem it within my province in this connection respectfully to submit to the legislature that, in the present state of society, it is no longer an abstract question, whether capital punishment is right, but whether it be practicable; and that there is good reason to believe that punishment for crime would more certainly follow its commission if the legislature should further abrogate the penalty of death. As the law now stands in this respect, its efficiency is mostly in its threatenings; but the terror of a trial is diminishing, and the culprit finds his impunity in the severity which it denounces.

Addresses made at the Tenth Woman's Rights Convention at Cooper Institute, New York, May 10 and 11, 1861.

Mr. President, Ladies, and Gentlemen: I wish I could carry on the same strain of remark which has just been addressed to you, for that touches the very heart of the question which brings us together this morning. We are seeking to change certain laws,--laws based on sex. Now, as he has suggested, there is another realm beside that of law, there is another arena beside the civil, and that is the social state. We arrange certain matters of the statute-book; we let other matters arrange themselves, according to what we call fashion and unfettered public opinion,--that is, society. We may gather a very distinct idea of what would be the natural result in civil affairs, if we look for a moment at what has been the result of the conflict of powers in the social state,--for there power works out untrammelled its natural result. Majorities do not rule there, but real power,--the agreeable, the fit, the useful,--that which commends itself to the best sense.

Social life began centuries ago, just where legal life stands to-day. It began with the recognition of man only. Woman was nothing; she was a drudge; she was a toy; she was a chattel; she was a connecting link between man and the brute. That is Oriental civilization. We drift westward, into the sunlight of Christianity and European civilization, and as Milton paints animal life freeing itself from the clod, and tells us, you recollect, of the tawny lion, with his mane and fore-feet liberated, pawing to get free his hinder parts, so the mental has gradually freed itself from the incumbrance of the animal, and we come round to a society based on thought, based on soul. What is the result? Why, it would be idle to say that there woman is man's equal; she is his superior. In social life she has taken the lead; she dictates. Hers is this realm, and from her judgment there is no appeal. Her intellect summoned literature into being, almost; as a reader she has demanded that it shall be decent; and now she takes her pen as a writer, and controls the world, as the sceptre of genius always controls it, no matter what lips, male or female, God's living coal has touched.

That, I say, is the counterpart, the picture, that represents to us what law and the civil state are to undergo in their successive changes. We are here to-day only to endeavor to enforce on the consideration of the civil state those elements of power which have already made a social state. You do not find it necessary to-day to say to a husband: Your wife has a right to read; or necessary to say to Dickens, You have as many women over your pages as men. You do not find it necessary to say to the male members of a church that the women members have a right to change their creed. All that is settled; nobody contests it. If a man stood up here and said, I am a Calvinist, and therefore my wife is bound to be one, --you would send him to a lunatic asylum. You would say, Poor man! don't judge him by what he says; he does n't mean it. But law is halting back just where that old civilization was; we want to change it.

We are not doing anything new. There is no fanaticism about it. We are merely extending the area of liberty,--nothing else. We have made great progress. The law passed in your State at the last session of the legislature grants, in fact, the whole question. The moment you grant us anything, we have gained the whole. You cannot stop with an inconsistent statute-book. A man is uneasy who is inconsistent. As old Fuller says, You cannot make one side of the face laugh, and the other cry! You cannot have one half your statute-book Jewish, and the other Christian; one half the statute-book Oriental, the other Saxon. You have granted that women may be hung, therefore you must grant that women may vote. You have granted that she may be taxed; therefore, on republican principles, you must grant that she ought to have a voice in fixing the laws of taxation,--and this is, in fact, all that we claim — the whole of it.

Now I want to consider some of the objections that are made to this claim. Men say: Woman is not fit to vote; she does not know enough; she has not sense enough to vote. I take this idea of the ballot as the Gibraltar of our claim for this reason, because I am speaking in a democracy; I am speaking under republican institutions. The rule of despotism is that one class is made to protect the other; that the rich, the noble, the educated, are a sort of Probate Court, to take care of the poor, the ignorant, and the common classes. Our fathers got rid of all that. They knocked it in the head by the simple principle that no class is safe, unless government is so arranged that each class has in its own hands the means of protecting itself. That is the idea of republics. The Briton says to the poor man: Be content! I am worth five millions and I will protect you; America says: Thank you, sir; I had rather take care of myself! --and that is the essence of democracy. [Applause.] It is the corner-stone of progress also, because, the moment you have admitted that poor, ignorant heart as an element of the government, able to mould your institutions, those five millions of dollars feel that their cradle is not safe and their life is in peril, unless that heart is bulwarked with education and informed with morality; selfishness dictates that wealth and education should do its utmost to educate poverty and hold up weakness,--and that is the philosophy of democratic institutions. [Applause.]

I am speaking in a republic which admits the principle that the poor are not to be protected by the rich, but to have the means of protecting themselves. So, too, with the ignorant; so, too, with races. The Irish are not to trust to the sense of justice in the Saxon; the German is not to trust to the native-born citizen; the Catholic is not to trust to the Protestant: but all sects, all classes, are to hold in their own hands the sceptre — the American sceptre — of the ballot, which protects each class. We claim it, therefore, for woman. The reply is that woman has not sense enough. If she has not, so much the more shame for your public schools,--educate her! If God did not give her mind enough, then you are brutes; for you say to her Madam, you have sense enough to earn your own living,--don't come to us! You make her earn her own bread, and if she has sense enough to do that, she has enough to say whether Fernando Wood or Governor Morgan shall take one cent out of every hundred to pay for fire-works. When you hold her up in both hands and say: Let me work for you! Don't move one of your dainty fingers! We will pour wealth into your lap, and be ye clothed in satin and velvet, all ye daughters of Eve! --then you will be consistent in saying that woman has not sense enough to vote; but if she has sense enough to work, to depend for her bread on her work, she has sense enough to vote.

Then, again, men say, She is so different from man that God did not mean she should vote. Is she? Then I do not know how to vote for her. [Applause.] One of two things is true: She is either exactly like man,--exactly like him, teetotally like him,--and if she is, then a ballot-box based upon brains belongs to her as well as him; or she is different, and then I do not know how to vote for her. If she is like me, so much like me, that I know just as well how to vote for her as she knows how to vote for herself, then,--the very basis of the ballot-box being capacity,--she, being the same as I, has the same right to vote; and if she is so different that she has a different range of avocations and powers and capacities, then it is necessary she should go into the legislature, and with her own voice say what she wants, and write her wishes into statute-books, because nobody is able to interpret her. Choose which horn of the dilemma you please, for on the one or the other, the question of the right of woman to vote must hang.

It is exactly the question of races. You might as well say that the Irishman is not like the Saxon; that the Hindoo is not like the Englishman,--the world admits that they are not. Races are different; therefore, the German may well say, You are a Yankee, with a soul curbed in a sixpence; you are not capable of voting for me. Your whole past and present are different from mine, and when I come to be an element in your civilization, I must shoot up my peaks into the highest land of legislative and civil life, because I want to be represented there as well as you.

I do not think woman is identical with man. I think if she was, marriage would be a very stupid state. God made the races and sexes the complement one of the other, and not the identical copy. I think the world, and literature itself, would be barren and insipid, if it was not for this exquisite variety of capacities and endowments with which God has variegated the human race. I think woman is different from man, and by reason of that very difference, she should be in legislative halls, and everywhere else, in order to protect herself.

But men say it would be very indelicate for woman to go to the ballot-box or sit in the legislature. Well, what would she see there? Why, she would see men. [Laughter.] She sees men now. In Cranford village, that sweet little sketch by Mrs. Gaskell, one of the characters says, I know these men,--my father was a man. [Laughter.] I think every woman can say the same. She meets men now, she could meet nothing but men at the ballot-box; or, if she meets brutes, they ought not to be there. [Applause.] Indelicate for her to go to the ballot-box!-but you may walk up and down Broadway any time from nine o'clock in the morning until nine at night, and you will find about equal numbers of men and women crowding that. thoroughfare, which is never still. You may get into an omnibus,--women are there, crowding us out sometimes. [Laughter.] You cannot go into a theatre without being crowded to death by two women to one man. If you go to the Lyceum, woman is there. I have stood on this very platform, and seen as many women as men before me, and one time, at least, when they could not have met any worse men at the ballotbox than they met in this hall. [Laughter and applause.] You may go to church, and you will find her facing men of all classes,--ignorant and wise, saints and sinners. I do not know anywhere that woman is not.

It is too late now to say that she cannot go to the ballot-box. Go back to Turkey, and shut her up in a harem; go back to Greece, and shut her up in the private apartments of women; go back to the old Oriental phases of civilization, that never allowed woman's eyes to light a man's pathway, unless he owned her, and you are consistent; but you see, we have broken down that bulwark centuries ago. You know they used to let a man be hung in public, and said that it was for the sake of the example. They got ashamed of it, and banished the gallows to the jail-yard, and allowed only twelve men to witness an execution. It is too late to say that you hang men for the example, because the example you are ashamed to have public cannot be a wholesome example.

So it is with this question of woman; you have granted so much, that you have left yourself no ground to stand on. My dear, delicate friend, you are out of your sphere; you ought to be in Turkey. My dear, religiously, scrupulously fashionable, exquisitely anxious hearer, fearful lest your wife or daughter or sister shall be sullied by looking into your neighbors' faces at the ballot-box, you do not belong to the century that has ballot-boxes. You belong to the century of Tamerlane and Timour the Tartar; you belong to China, where the women have no feet, because it is not meant that they shall walk. You belong anywhere but in America; and if you want an answer, walk down Broadway and meet a hundred thousand petticoats, and they are a hundred thousand answers. For if woman can walk the streets, she can go to the ballot-box, and any reason of indelicacy that forbids the one, covers the other.

Woman will meet at the ballot-box the same men she sees in the lecture-room, the church, the theatre, the railroad cars, and the public streets. Long used to respect woman's presence in those places, the vast majority of men obey there the laws of decency and good manners; and no husband or father thinks it necessary to prohibit entirely his wife or daughter's entrance to a theatre, church, car, or street, because some rare individual may chance to insult or offend her. Indeed, I may go further. The bully who knocks your hat over your eyes at the polling-booth would turn you out of his own house if you uttered a word disrespectful to his wife, mother, or daughter. He knows what is due to woman. Let woman go to the ballot-box, and the rudest man will in time be ashamed not to carry there his good manners. The keenest insult you can offer even to a rowdy,--the one he will resent the quickest,--is to hint that he does not know what is due to woman. In his own parlor he puts on his decency, and claims it of others. I will extend that parlor until it includes the polling-booth, when I give to both alike the restraining influence of the presence of woman.

All we ask is, that our civilization shall be made complete and consistent. We base our civilization on ideas. We say that representation and taxation go hand in hand. We say that Daniel Webster, no matter though his gifts be godlike, is entitled to no more ballots than the Irishman who pays nine shillings' poll-tax, and can just write his own name. We do not base our institutions on mental discipline, on culture; we base them on enough brains to be responsible to penal statutes. The man who is not enough of an idiot to be excused from the gallows, has sanity enough to be entitled to vote. That is the principle of Republicanism. Now, I claim, and always shall claim, that as long as woman has brains enough to be hung, she has brains enough to go to the ballot-box; and not until you strike her name off the tax-list, and excuse her from penal legislation, will you, be justified in keeping her name off the list of voters:

Men say, Why do you, come here? What good are you going to do,? You do nothing but talk. Oh, yes, we have done a good deal beside talk! But suppose we had done nothing but talk? I saw a poor man the other day, and said he (speaking of a certain period in his life), I felt very friendless and alone,--I had only God with me; and he seemed to think that was not much. And so thirty millions of thinking, reading people are constantly throwing it in the teeth of reformers that they rely upon talk! What is talk? Why, it is the representative of brains. And what is the characteristic glory of the nineteenth century? That it is ruled by brains, and not by muscle; that rifles are gone by, and ideas have come in; and,. of course, in such an era, talk is the fountain-head of all things. But we have done a great deal. In the first place, you will meet dozens of men who say, Oh, woman's right to property, the right of the wife to her own earnings, we grant that; we always thought that; we have had that idea for a dozen years. I met: a man the other day in the cars, and we read the statute of your New York Legislature. Why, said he; that is nothing; I have assented to that for these fifteen years. All I could say to that was this,--This agitation has either given you the idea, or it has given you the courage to utter it for nobody ever heard it from you until today. These new-comers On our platform — very welcome they are!--must come under one guise or the other. This agitation, of which Mrs. Rose has sketched the history, has either given them their principles, or given them their lips. It has given them the thoughts, or the courage to utter the thoughts; and in either sense, it is a useful method, it is a beneficial result. It has helped them, and it is beginning to help the community.

What do we toil for? Why, my friends, I do not care much whether a woman actually goes to the ballot-box and votes — that is a slight matter; and I shall not wait, either, to know whether every woman in this audience wants to vote. Some of you were saying to-day, in these very seats,--coming here out of mere curiosity, to see what certain fanatics could find to say,--Why, I don't want any more rights; I have rights enough. Many a lady whose husband is what he ought to be, feeling no want unsupplied, is ready to say, I have all the rights I want. So the daughter of Louis XVI., in the troublous times of 1791, when somebody told her that the people were starving in the streets of Paris, exclaimed, What fools I would eat bread first Thus, wealth, comfort, and ease say, I have rights enough. Nobody doubted it, Madam! But the question is not of you; the question is of some houseless wife of a drunkard; the question is of some ground-down daughter of toil, whose earnings are filched from her by the rumdebts of a selfishness which the law makes to have a right over her, in the person of a husband. The question is not of you, it is of some friendless woman of twenty, standing at the door of the world, educated, capable, desirous of serving her time and her race, and saying, Where shall I use these talents? How shall I earn bread? And Orthodox society, cabined and cribbed in Saint Paul, cries out, Go sew, jade! We have no other channel for you. Go to the needle, or wear yourself to death as a school-mistress. We come here to endeavor to convince you, and so to shape our institutions that public opinion, following in the wake, shall be willing to open channels for the agreeable and profit, able occupation of women as much as for men,

People blame the shirt-makers and tailors because they pay two cents where they ought to pay fifty. It is not their fault; they are nothing but the weather-cocks, and society is the wind. Trade does not grow out of the Sermon on the Mount; merchants never have any hearts, they have only ledgers; two per cent a month is their Sermon on the Mount, and a balance on the wrong side of the ledger is their demonstration. [Laughter.] Nobody finds fault with them for it; everything according to the law of its life. A man pays as much for making shirts or coats as it is necessary to pay, and he would be a fool and a bankrupt if he paid any more. He needs only a hundred work-women; there are a thousand women standing at his door saying, Give us work; and if it is worth ten cents to do it, we will do it for two; and a hundred get the work, and nine hundred are turned into the street, to drag down this city into the pit that it deserves. [Loud applause.]

Now, what is the remedy? To take that tailor by the throat and gibbet him in the New York Tribune? Not at all; it does the women no good, and he does not deserve it. I will tell you what is to be done. Let public opinion only grant that, like their thousand brothers, those thousand 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.

This is all we claim; and we claim the ballot for this reason: the moment you give woman power, that moment men will see to it that she has the way cleared for her. There are two sources of power,--one is civil, the ballot; the other is physical, the rifle. I do not believe that the upper classes,--education, wealth, aristocracy, conservatism,--the men that are in, ever yielded except to fear. I think the history of the race shows that the upper classes never granted a privilege to the lower out of love. As Jeremy Bentham says, the upper classes never yielded a privilege without being bullied out of it. When man rises in revolution, with the sword in his right hand, trembling wealth and conservatism say, What do you want? Take it; but grant me my life. The Duke of Tuscany, Elizabeth Barrett Browning has told us, swore to a dozen constitutions when the Tuscans stood armed in the streets of Florence, and he forgot them when the Austrians came in and took the rifles out of the Tuscan's hands. You must force the upper classes to do justice by physical or some other power. The age of physical power is gone, and we want to put ballots into the hands of women. We do not wait for women to ask for them. When 1 argue the Temperance Question, I do not go down to the drunkard and ask, Do you want a prohibitory law? I know what is good for him a great deal better than he does. [Applause.] When I meet an ignorant set of boys in the street, I don't say, My poor little ignoramuses, would you like to have a system of public schools? I know a great deal better what is good for them than they do. Our fathers established public schools before dunces asked for them.

What proves the clearest woman's need of the ballot? Why, the very inertness and ignorance which the lack of it has caused her. Like all other injustice and slavery, its worst effect is that it weakens, degrades, and darkens its victims, till they no longer realize the harm done them. Wasted on trifles, cramped by routine, lacking the stick and breadth which interest in great questions gives, many women grope or flutter on, ignorant of the real cause that saddens their life, burdens their toil, starves their nature, and sows their path with thorns. Those whom circumstances have lifted to broader views must not wait for her request before they open to woman the advantages by which they have profited so much. Besides, we lose half our resources when we shut women out from beaten the influence of these elements of growth. God gives us the whole race with its varied endowments, man and woman, one the complement of the other, on which to base civilization. We starve ourselves by using in civil affairs only half — only one sex. I spoke a year ago of the stride literature made when women began to write and read. Politics will reap as great a gain when she enters its field.

I mean to get the ballot for women — why? Because Republicanism demands it; because the theory of our institutions demands it; because the moral health of the country demands it. What is our Western civilization in this State of New York, in this city of New York? A failure! As Humboldt well said, as Earl Gray has said in the House of Lords, The experiment of American government is a failure to-day. It cannot be denied. If this is the best that free institutions can do, then just as good, and a great deal better, can be done by despotism. The city of Paris to-day, with but one will in it, that of Napoleon, spends less, probably, than the city of New York spends, and the results are, comfort, safety, health, quiet, peace, beauty, civilization. New York, governed by brothels and grog-shops, spends twenty-five per cent more, and the results are, murder, drunkenness, rowdyism, unsafety, dirt, and disgrace! I think there is something to be said for despotism in that point of view. I weigh Paris, the representative of despotism, against New York, the representative of Young America, and New York kicks the beam. No man can deny it. It is a failure on two grounds,--it is a failure, because the law ,of political economy has given to man good wages, and science has invented for him drink cheap as water, and held it to his lips, and said, Make a brute of yourself!

Intemperance, that gigantic foe of modern civilization, is the chasm in the forum which seems destined to swallow up the capacity of self-government. In the olden times, wine was dear, and only the upper classes could afford to get drunk. Around the shores of the Mediterranean, the stimulus of the stomach was no temptation; their climate tempted men on a different side. We are Saxons, our blood aches for a stimulus, by way of the stomach-appetite! Our idea of heaven is the skulls of our enemies, flowing over with rich wine. That is the blood that courses in our veins. In our streets, science pours out her drink like water. Political economy puts in every man's hand, by the labor of half a day, money enough to be drunk a week.

There is one temptation, dragging down the possibility of self-government into the pit of imbruted humanity, and on the other side, is that hideous problem of modern civilized life — prostitution — born of Orthodox scruples and aristocratic fastidiousness; born of that fastidious denial of the right of woman to choose her own work, and, like her brother, to satisfy her ambition, her love of luxury, her love of material gratifications, by fair wages for fair work. As long as you deny it, as long as the pulpit covers with its fastidious Orthodoxy this question from the consideration of the public, it is but a concealed brothel, although it calls itself an Orthodox pulpit. [Applause and hisses.] I know what I say; your hisses cannot change it. Go, clean out the Gehenna of New York! [Applause.] Go, sweep the Augean stable that makes Now York the lazar-house of corruption! You know that on one side or the other of these temptations lies very much of the evil of modern civilized life. You know that before them, statesmanship folds its hands in despair. Here is a method by which to take care of at least one. Give men fair wages, and ninety-nine out of a hundred will disdain to steal. The way to prevent dishonesty is to let every man have a field for his work, and honest wages; the way to prevent licentiousness is to give to woman's capacity free play. Give to the higher powers activity, and they will choke down the animal. The mall who loves thinking, disdains to be the victim of appetite. It is a law of our nature. Give a hundred women honest wages for capacity and toil, and ninety-nine will disdain to win it by vice. That is the cure for licentiousness. [Applause.]

I wish to put into our civil life the element of woman's right to shape the laws, for all our social life copies largely from the statute-book. Let woman dictate at the Capital, let her say to

Address delivered in New York City, May 10, 1866.

Ladies and gentlemen: I am very glad that all that will be required of me this morning, is to answer to the roll-call,--to say Yes to my name. You know you cannot have more than the whole of a subject. That is not possible. I have only had the pleasure of listening to the last address, by our friend Henry Ward Beecher; and I think if he had left a suggestion unmade, or any part of the field unexplored, I would have made an effort to supply the omission. But as I watched him step by step, it seemed to me that General Grant could not have covered his camp and his lines more effectually, from centre to outpost. Oliver Wendell Holmes said once that there was always a representative man who went out of every lecture-room at a certain period, at all seasons of the year, and in all parts of the country. The lyceum lecturers held a consultation to learn the cause, and Holmes, being a surgeon, performed an autopsy, and found that the reason was that the man's brain was full; and when he came to that state, he went out. I think you must all have come to that state. There is no speech left for us who follow to make; but I hope you will allow me a single suggestion.

I think our friend touched the very kernel of the whole subject when he reminded you that suffrage was not alone woman's right, but woman's duty. I believe that to confer the ballot will add but little to the influence of woman. I am interested in this question, because I wish to put recognized power where there already exists unrecognized influence. I think unrecognized influence is always dangerous. It acts under no adequate sense of responsibility. Society does not attempt to check it. It is unheeded and unwatched. Consequently it is always doubly liable to corruption.

I believe that to-day it may be said, more truly than of any other cause in our social philosophy, that woman rules the State. What made the Southern rebellion? Woman did not make it; but without the enthusiasm and the frenzy of women on its side, it never could have been made. What was the potent influence that almost tore the Republic asunder? Woman's. Yet that wide-spread, deep-anchored force had swayed the Southern mind for years,--under no sense of civil responsibility, neither watched nor educated, never in the eye of day, never feeling that it was doing anything which needed to be summoned before the tribunal of conscience.

Our friend said that if woman could vote, she would shut up the groggeries of this city. She could shut them up to-day. Albany is nothing compared with fashion. What is the legislature compared with the ton that permeates society,--the throne that woman first founded, and has ever since filled? More than college, stronger than church, weightier than trade, more controlling than all put together, woman is its recognized queen. If she issued her edict to-day, unfaltering, unmixed, undoubting, there could nought but submission follow. A vote is a great thing; legislation is a large power,--but money is a larger power. Why do not women make money? They have the faculty. The brother comes into this city; no man knows his name; his purse is empty; his word would not be worth five dollars, and his opinion less; he lives here a dozen years, walks up and down

Address in Faneuil Hall, November 2, 1865.

It is twenty-nine years this month since I first stood on the platform of Faneuil Hall to address an audience of the citizens of Boston. I felt then that I was speaking for the cause of the laboring men, and if tonight I should make the last speech of my life, I would be glad that it should be in the same strain,--for laboring men and their rights.

The labor of these twenty-nine years has been in behalf of a race bought and sold. The South did not rest their system wholly on this claim to own their laborers; but according to Chancellor Harper, Alexander H. Stevens, Governor Pickens, and John C. Calhoun, asserted that the laborer must necessarily be owned by capitalists or individuals. That struggle for the ownership of labor is now somewhat near its end; and we fitly commence a struggle to define and to arrange the true relations of capital and labor. To-day one of your sons is born. He lies in his cradle as the child of a man without means, with a little education, and with less leisure. The favored child of the capitalist is borne up by every circumstance, as on the eagle's wings. The problem of to-day is how to make the chances of the two as equal as possible; and before this movement stops, every child born in America must have an equal chance in life.

In this final arrangement, every man will combine in his own person the laborer and the capitalist. There cannot be any conflict between labor and capital. What makes our lives easier than those of our ancestors? They are so because six generations of workmen have made Massachusetts a great treasure-house of capital. When our fathers landed here, Massachusetts was a wilderness. Forests have been removed, roads built, cities raised by capital or aggregated labor. Capital and labor are only the two arms of a pair of scissors,--useless when separate, and only when fastened together cutting everything before them.

What, then, do we come here for? To find out the true relation between capital and labor, to make the laborer more comfortable, and a more worthy citizen. Where the government rests on the people, its administrators are bound to give time to the laborers to understand the theory of government. When shut up an excessive number of hours in labor, the workman comes out but the fag-end of a man, without brain to think of such subjects. Now, therefore, it is a fair division to give him eight hours for labor, eight hours for sleep, and eight hours for his own,--his own to use as he pleases. [Applause.] I shall not be the first to say, You shall not have it unless you come under bonds to use it well. It is none of my business to say what he shall do with what is his own. I shall not say to the millionnaire, We will defend you in the possession of your stocks and bonds, if you will use them well. I may argue with him, and shall, to use his wealth properly; but my first object shall be to give it to him, because it belongs to him. It has been argued that the negro would not work if his freedom was given to him. I have answered, his freedom belongs to him, and he is responsible for its use.

The present effort is to give the laborer more leisure, in order to make him more intelligent. Never, in history, has more leisure been secured to the working-classes, but greater intelligence has resulted therefrom. Thirty millions of Frenchmen to-day hold a voice in the government, because the cry against lessening their labors was not heeded. The same cry has been raised here; it has been said that the workman will not work unless you starve him, that starvation is the only stimulus which the masses will obey. I don't believe it, and I want to lift them to the possibility of showing that it is not true.

Now, how shall this thing be done? I will tell you, I have had a little experience in this matter. [Laughter.] I have never held, and never expect to hold, a political office; but this I know, that the man who only looks at the game can sometimes criticise it better than the players. This country is one of ideas. You can never gain your point by threats; it would be disgraceful to gain it thus. 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 might as well try to roll back Niagara, as to try to rule New England against her ideas. You have got to face them, and to change them. You need not despair if truth is on your side. You must have the truth, and must work for it. There are three sorts of men,--those who have the truth, but lock it up; those who have it not, but work like the devil against it; and those who have it, and force it on the willing conscience of the nation. You want books and journals. I am glad you have one Voice; but one can't cover the State or the North. You want something to subjugate all journals, and bring cultivated minds and foremost men to your service. Opinions differ not from scoundrelism or want of heart. You want to make the intellect of the country discuss the question, to make every man speak of it. How did we Antislavery men do this? [A voice, Kept at it! ] Yes, kept at it. You know the patient Job said, Oh, that mine adversary had written a book! Well, he was a wise man. [Laughter.] When I made a speech here, the Daily Advertiser abused me; but it could not abuse justice so much but that men could see the delusion. I defy a man to make an argument against the laws of God that will hold water. Any man trying to dodge justice will answer himself.

How will you make the newspapers and the public men discuss the Labor Question? I will tell you. Go into the political field, and by the voice of forty thousand workmen say, We mean that eight hours shall be a day's work, and no man shall go into office who opposes it. What will be the result? It will be the same as in 1846, when the Abolitionists said they were going to trample on the Whig and Democratic parties. The journals then took up the question; the intellect and education of the country took hold of it, and settled it by balking the South so that they said, Make or ruin, we will go outside. How will you make your enemies wield the pen? Do it by announcing your political creed. Break into the debating society at the statehouse, and make them discuss the Labor Question. I don't want the subject made political in a bad sense of the word, but in a higher sense. When men have wrongs to complain of, they should go to the ballot-box and right them. I may be asked if I would give universal suffrage to ignorant men, and thus give them power over the property of the millionaire. I answer, Yes; all the more for that, because then the millionaire would be willing to give a part of his wealth to aid in making voters intelligent. Universal suffrage is taking a bond of the rich to educate the poor. You will never reach the influential classes by meetings like these. How will you do it? Go to your next candidate for mayor, and ask him if he is in favor of the eight-hour system. If he says, Yes, let it be known that he is to have your votes. If No, let him know that he will not have them. You will not, perhaps, gain the victory the first time. It would be a disgrace if you did. [A voice, Why? Because it would look as if you had frightened the city of Boston. You will gain your point by argument. The Journal, the Advertiser, the Transcript will discuss it, and the State will be lifted by the four corners. You will gain in twelve months what we gained in twelve years, if you are true to yourselves.

Some may think this a political address. I belong to no political party, and if I live to the age of Methuselah, do not expect a vote. I want Charles Sumner to stand on this platform, and give his views on this question; I want Samuel Hooper to come down here and look his constituents in the face; I want Henry Wilson, with his tireless activity, to give his labors to the working-men. Abbott Lawrence, in 1840, when asked by a committee of his constituents what his opinion was in regard to slavery in the District of Columbia, said he did n't know as he had any opinion on the subject, and if he had, it was not worth while to express it. Twenty years later he would have cut off his hands rather than give such an answer. Two years hence, if you are true to yourselves, instead of having an Ishmaelite like me to address you, you can take your pick out of all the politicians in the country; instead of one journal, you will have all the journals discussing the Labor Question.

You must imitate the tenacity of the Abolitionists in adhering to a single issue. The Temperance party committed the folly of depending upon resolutions, and voting for Whigs and Democrats; and influential men, seeing that they did not value their own principles, left them out in the cold. There are men enough here to govern this city. When you have convinced thinking men that it is right, and humane men that it is just, you will gain your cause. Men always lose half of what is gained by violence. What is gained by argument, is gained forever. Mass meetings like these amount to nothing. A political movement, saying, We will have our rights, is a mass meeting in perpetual session. Filtered through the ballot-box comes the will of the people, and statesmen bow to it. Go home, and say that the working-men of Massachusetts are a unit, and that they mean to stereotype their purpose on the statute-book.

An Editorial in the National (Antislavery) standard, July 30, 1870.

We welcome every man of every race to our soil and to the protection of our laws. We welcome every man to the best opportunities of improving himself and making money that our social and political systems afford. Let every oppressed man come; let every poor man come; let every man who wishes to change his residence come,--we welcome all; frankly acknowledging the principle that every human being has the right to choose his residence just where he pleases on the planet. Our faith in our political institutions and in our social system is that both can endure all the strain which such immigration will produce. More than this, we believe that our civilization will be perfected only by gathering into itself the patient toil, the content with moderate wages, the cunning hand, the inventive brain, the taste and aspirations, the deep religious sentiment, the rollicking humor and vivid imagination, the profound insight and far-reaching sagacity which mark the different races; each contributing one special trait to the great whole.

But such immigration to be safe and helpful must be spontaneous. It must be the result of individual will obeying the laws of industry and the tendencies of the age. Immigration of labor is an unmixed good. Importation of human freight is an unmitigated evil.

This brings us to the question of importing Chinese laborers. The Chinese are a painstaking, industrious, thrifty, inventive, self-respectful, and law-abiding race. They have some pretentions to democratic institutions and moral culture,--are a little too much machines; but we shall soon shake that servility out of them. Their coming will be a welcome and valuable addition to the mosaic of our nationality; but, in order to that, they must come spontaneously, of their own free-will and motion, as the Irish, Germans, and English have done. If the capital of the country sets to work, by system and wide co-operation, to import them in masses, to disgorge them upon us with unnatural rapidity,--then their coming will be a peril to our political system, and a disastrous check to our social progress.

We lay it down as a fundamental principle,--never to be lost sight of,--that every immigrant of every race must be admitted to citizenship, if he asks for it. The right to be naturalized must not be limited by race, creed, or birthplace. Secondly, every adult here, native or naturalized, must vote. In spite of this, give us time, with only a natural amount of immigration, and we can trust the education and numbers of our native voters to safely absorb and make over the foreign element. Irish and German immigration has been only a ripple on our ocean's breadth; generally speaking, it has been only a healthy stir. But it is easily possible for associated capital to hurry the coming of the Chinese in such masses as will enable these money lords to control the ballot-box by their bond-servants. An extended North Adams can do more than lessen shoemakers' wages; one thousand such Samsons, the associated capital of Massachusetts, can swamp and overwhelm the ballot-box. of that State. We hold it to be clearly within the province, and at clearly the duty of legislation, to avert this danger. Capital is too strong now. The public welfare demands that its political power be crippled. Universal suffrage is admissible only on condition of an educated people. We cannot undertake to educate the whole world at once. In detachments, million by million, we can digest the whole human race.

Then as to the influence of such importation on the laboring classes. The Chinaman will make shoes for seventy-five cents a day. The average wages for such work in Massachusetts is two dollars. What will become of the native working-men under such competition? He met similar competition from the Irish immigrants and the German; but it never harmed him. They came in such natural and moderate numbers as to be easily absorbed, without producing any ill-effect on wages. These continued steadily to advance. So will it be in the case of the Chinese, if he be left to come naturally by his individual motion; imported in overwhelming masses by the concerted action of capital, he will crush the labor of America down to a pauper level, for many years to come.

Putting aside all theories, every lover of progress must see, with profound regret, the introduction here of any element which will lessen wages. The mainspring of our progress is high wages,--wages at such a level that the working-man can spare his wife to preside over a home, can command leisure, go to lectures, take a newspaper, and lift himself from the deadening routine of mere toil. That dollar left after all the bills are paid on Saturday night, means education, independence, self-respect, manhood; it increases the value of every acre near by, fills the town with dwellings, opens public libraries and crowds them; dots the continent with cities, and cobwebs it with railways. That one remaining dollar insures progress, and guarantees Astor's millions to their owner better than a score of statutes. It is worth more than a thousand colleges, and makes armies and police superfluous.

The importation of Chinese labor seeks to take that dollar from our working-man. The true statesman must regard such a policy as madness. The philanthropist must consider it cruel and mad too. Even so much of such a result as will inevitably be wrought by the natural immigration of the Chinese is to be deplored; every aggravation of it is to be resisted for the sake of republicanism and civilization. If we cannot find in the armory of the law some effectual weapon to prevent it, our political and social future, for fifty years, is dark indeed, and such a fate as swallowed up Roman civilization is by no means impossible.

Every one cries out for cheap labor to develop the country. Even if material or pecuniary gain were the only requisite for social or natural progress,--which, of course it is far from being,--still it is true that unsettled lands may be opened up too fast for profit, much more for real progress. Indeed, this random and thoughtless cry for cheap labor is one of the great mistakes of heartless and superficial economists; seldom has there been a graver mistake. We assert unhesitatingly that cheap productions are an unmixed good; cheap labor is an unmitigated evil. Human progress shows itself in a fall of prices and a rise of wages. Although labor makes one half the cost of production, still it is true that the world gains just so fast as prices fall and wages rise. To insure progress, the cost of everything but human muscle and brains must fall. The remuneration of these two elements in production must rise. In William Penn's time it took one hundred and thirty-seven days toil to buy a ton of flour; in 1790, one hundred and twenty-five days labor would buy it; In 1835, eighty days work sufficed; now, in 1870, probably forty or fifty days wages would buy a ton of flour. That fact measures and explains the social, industrial, moral, and political progress of Pennsylvania.

In view of such a rule we claim the right of government to check any forced and unnatural importation of labor; against such a claim the advocate of a protective tariff cannot consistently open his mouth. If government may and should protect a nation against pauper labor in other lands, this surely — this immigration of pauper labor — is the most threatening danger. If you would be consistent, Mr. Protectionist, join with us in devising effectual methods to avert it. If the Free Trader assails us with his objection, Has not the laborer a right to buy his coat or flour in the cheapest market? We answer, Yes, under certain restrictions. To purchase the products of the earth, manufactured or otherwise, wherever you can get them cheapest, is good; good for the seller and good for the purchaser. But this is only true provided there is no artificial combination, no plot of powerful men or classes to flood the market of one land with the surplus of another. Every competition that comes in natural currents, from individual enterprise, is a healthy tendency to average. Secondly, this restriction is to be still more stringently enforced in the purchase of human labor; since the artificial and forced antagonism of that deranges society, undermines government, obstructs progress, crushes individual effort, and drags the highest type of human attainments down to the murky level of the lowest and idlest barbarism. Against anything which threatens such results government has the right to defend society by appropriate laws.

The rate of wages is said to depend upon supply and demand. The rule is sound; but so equivocal that it is worth little. Rate of wages really depends on what the workman thinks will buy him the necessities of life.

There are men in England whose highest idea of life is to work sixteen hours a day, go naked, eat meat once a year, herd — both sexes and all ages-with cattle under one roof, and need only two hundred words to express all their ideas. Such men will work for enough to supply these natural wants. When wages fall below that, they steal, starve, or wake to an intellectual effort to better themselves; their idea of necessaries does much to fix the rate of wages. A Yankee farmer's boy must have good clothes, schooling, ample food, and something over,--these are his necessities. When wages will not buy them he ceases to belong to the ranks of supply, and carves out a new career. There are good food and high wages in the kitchens of New York; more than many trades afford. A great demand there for American girls; no supply nevertheless. We know it is only a sentiment that prevents; but that sentiment is as rigid as iron and inexorable as fate.

Supply and demand, therefore, are to be understood, with a qualification. The ideas of the supply are a most important element in the calculation. What are the ideas of the supply ? These regulate his wages. The Chinaman works cheap because he is a barbarian, and seeks gratification of only the lowest, the most inevitable wants. The American demands more because the ages,--because Homer and Plato, Egypt and Rome, Luther and Shakspeare, Cromwell and Washington, the printing-press and the telegraph, the ballot-box and the Bible,--have made him ten times as much a man. Bring the Chinese to us slowly, naturally, and we shall soon lift him to the level of the same artificial and civilized wants that we feel. Then capitalist and laborer will both be equally helped. Fill our industrial channels with imported millions, and you choke them ruinously. They who seek to flood us, artificially, with barbarous labor, are dragging down the American home to the level of the houseless street-herds of China. If the working-men have not combined to prevent this, it is time they should. When rich men conspire, poor men should combine.

In such combinations,--inevitable and indispensable in the circumstances,--the best minds and hearts of the land are with them. Only let them be sure not to copy the tyranny which makes their opponents weak. Their only strength is an admitted principle,--all men equal, equally free to carve each his own career, and entitled to all the aid his fellows can give. Stand on that unflinchingly; rebuke every threat; avoid all violence; appeal only to discussion and the ballot. You outnumber the capitalists at any rate. The ballot was given for just such crises as these; use it, and you oblige the press to discuss your claims. Use it remorselessly, and legislatures will soon find a remedy. Compel attention by fidelity to each other. Inscribe on your ballot-boxes, here we never forgive.

At the Labor-Reform Convention, which assembled at Worcester, September 4, 1871, Mr. Phillips presided, and presented the following resolutions, which were unanimously adopted. They are, indeed, a full body of faith; and they show just where Mr. Phillips stood for the last thirteen years of his life.

Delivered before the International Grand Lodge of the Knights of Saint Crispin, in April, 1872.

Gentlemen, I feel honored by this welcome of your organization, and especially so when I consider that the marvellously rapid success of the political strength of the Labor movement, especially in New England, is due mainly to this organization. There never has been a party formed that in three years has attracted toward itself such profound attention throughout the United States. Some of you may be old enough to remember that when the Antislavery sentiment, nearly thirty years ago, endeavored to rally a political party, it took them some seven or nine years before they had an organization that could be considered national in any real sense. The political Labor movement in three years has reached a position of influence which it took that idea nine years to obtain.

I trace that rapid progress in popular recognition to the existence of these Crispin lodges and trades-unions of the State. You cannot marshal fifty thousand men at once, taken promiscuously from parties and sects; they must be trained to work together, they must be disciplined in co-operation; and it is the training and the discipline which the working-men got in these organizations that enabled the Labor movement to assume its proportions so rapidly.

Then, again, I stand here with great interest from another consideration,--I stand in the presence of a momentous power. I do not care exactly what your idea is as to how you will work, whether you will work in this channel or in the other. I am told that you represent from seventy thousand to one hundred thousand men, here and elsewhere. Think of it! A hundred thousand men! They can dictate the fate of this nation. Give me fifty thousand men in earnest, who can agree on all vital questions, who will plant their shoulders together, and swear by all that is true and just that for the long years they will put their great idea before the country, and those fifty thousand men will govern the nation. So if I have one hundred thousand men represented before me, who are in earnest, who get hold of the great question of labor, and having hold of it, grapple with it, and rip it and tear it open, and invest it with light, gathering the facts, piercing the brains about them and crowding those brains with the facts,--then I know, sure as fate, though I may not live to see it, that they will certainly conquer this nation in twenty years. It is impossible that they should not. And that is your power, gentlemen.

I rejoice at every effort working-men make to organize; I do not care on what basis they do it. Men sometimes say to me, Are you an Internationalist? I say, I do not know what an Internationalist is; but they tell me it is a system by which the working-men from London to Gibraltar, from Moscow to Paris, can clasp hands. Then I say God speed, God speed, to that or any similar movement.

Now, let me tell you where the great weakness of an association of working-men is. It is that it cannot wait. It does not know where it is to get its food for next week. If it is kept idle for ten days, the funds of the society are exhausted. Capital can fold its arms, and wait six months; it can wait a year. It will be poorer, but it does not get to the bottom of the purse. It can afford to wait; it can tire you out, and starve you out. And what is there against that immense preponderance of power on the part of capital? Simply organization. That makes the wealth of all, the wealth of every one. So I welcome organization. I do not care whether it calls itself Trades-union, Crispin, International, or Commune; anything that masses up the units in order that they may put in a united force to face the organization of capital, anything that does that, I say amen to it. One hundred thousand men! It is an immense army. I do not care whether it considers chiefly the industrial or the political questions; it can control the nation if it is in earnest. The reason why the Abolitionists brought the nation down to fighting their battle is that they were really in earnest, knew what they wanted, and were determined to have it. Therefore they got it. The leading statesmen and orators of the day said they would never urge abolition; but a determined man in a printing-office said that they should, and they did it.

And so it is with this question exactly. Brains govern this country; and I hope to God the time will never come when brains won't govern it, for they ought to. And the way in which you can compel the brains to listen and to attend to you on the question of labor, actually to concentrate the intellectual power of the nation upon it, is by gathering together by hundreds of thousands, no matter whether it be on an industrial basis or a political basis, and saying to the nation, We are the numbers, and we will be heard, and you may be sure that you will. Now, an Englishman has but one method to pursue, to be heard. He puts his arm up among the cog-wheels of the industrial machine, and stops it. That is a strike. The London Times looks down and says, What in heaven is the matter? That is just what the man wants; he wishes to call public attention to the facts, and the consequence is that every newspaper joins with the Times, and asks what is the matter, and the whole brain of the English nation is turned to consider the question. That is good, but we have a quicker way than that. We do not need to put our hands up among the cog-wheels, and stop the machine. Pierpont said of the little ballot,--

Now, I turn my sight that way because I am a Democrat, a Jeffersonian Democrat in the darkest hour. England can look down into Lancashire, rotting in ignorance; and if the people there rise up to claim their share of the enjoyments of life, she need not care, because she says, I have got the laws of state in the hands of the middle classes; and if that man down there can handle a spade, or work in a mill, it is all I want of him; and, if he ever raises his hand against the State, I will put my cavalrymen into the saddle, and ride him down. The man is nothing but a tool to do a certain work.

But when America looks down into her Lancashire, into the mines of Pennsylvania, she says literally, Well, his hand holds the ballot, and I cannot afford to leave him down there in ignorance. I admire democracy because it takes bonds of wealth and power, that they shall raise the masses. If they don't do it, there is no security. Therefore, on every great question I turn instantly to politics. It is the people's normal school; it is the way to make the brains of the nation approach the subject. Why, in 1861 or 1862, when I first approached this question, you could not get an article on the Labor movement in any newspaper or magazine, unless, indeed, there was a strike, or something of that sort. Now you cannot take up any of the leading newspapers or magazines without finding them full of it; editors eat, drink, and sleep on it. The question is so broad, it has so many different channels, that it puzzles them. Even John Stuart Mill has not attempted to cover its whole breadth. It takes in everything.

Let me tell you why I am interested in the Labor Question. Not simply because of the long hours of labor; not simply because of a specific oppression of a class. I sympathize with the sufferers there; I am ready to fight on their side. But I look out upon Christendom, with its three hundred millions of people, and I see, that, out of this number of people, one hundred millions never had enough to eat. Physiologists tell us that this body of ours, unless it is properly fed, properly developed, fed with rich blood and carefully nourished, does no justice to the brain. You cannot make a bright or a good man in a starved body; and so this one third of the inhabitants of Christendom, who have never had food enough, can never be what they should be.

Now, I say that the social civilization.which condemns every third man in it to be below the average in the nourishment God prepared for him, did not come from above; it came from below; and the sooner it goes down, the better. Come on this side of the ocean. You will find forty millions of people, and I suppose they are in the highest state of civilization; and yet it is not too much to say, that, out of that forty millions, ten millions, at least, who get up in the morning and go to bed at night, spend all the day in the mere effort to get bread enough to live. They have not elasticity enough, mind or body, left to do anything in the way of intellectual or moral progress.

I take a man, for instance, in one of the manufacturing valleys of Connecticut. If you get into the cars there at 6.30 o'clock in the morning, as I have done, you will find, getting in at every little station, a score or more of laboring men and women, with their dinner in a pail; and they get out at some factory that is already lighted up. Go down the same valley about 7.30 in the evening, and you will again see them going home. They must have got up about 5.30; they are at their work until nigh upon eight o'clock. There is a good, solid fourteen hours. Now, there will be a strong, substantial man, like Cobbett, for.instance, who will sit up nights studying, and who will be a scholar at last among them, perhaps; but he is an expert. The average man, nine out of ten, when he gets home at night, does not care to read an article from the North American, nor a long speech from Charles Sumner. No; if he can't have a good story, and a warm supper, and a glass of grog perhaps, he goes off to bed. Now, I say that the civilization that has produced this state of things in nearly the hundredth year of the American Republic did not come from above.

I believe in the Temperance movement. I am a Temperance man of nearly forty years standing; and I think it one of the grandest things in the world, because it holds the basis of self-control. Intemperance is the cause of poverty, I know; but there is another side to that,--poverty is the cause of intemperance. Crowd a man with fourteen hours work a day, and you crowd him down to a mere animal life. You have eclipsed his aspirations, dulled his tastes, stunted his intellect, and made him a mere tool, to work fourteen hours and catch a thought in the interval; and while one man in a hundred will rise to be a genius, ninety-nine will cower down under the circumstances. Now, I can tell you a fact. In London, the other day, it was found that one club of gentlemen, a thousand strong, spent twenty thousand dollars at the club-house during the year for drink. Well, I would allow them twenty thousand dollars more at home for liquor, making in all forty thousand dollars a year. These men were all men of education and leisure; they had books and paintings, opera, race-course, and regatta. A thousand men down in Portsmouth in a ship-yard, working under a boss, spent at the grog-shops of the place, in that year, eighty thousand dollars,--double that of their rich brethren. What is the explanation of such a fact as that? Why, the club-man had a circle of pleasures and of company; the operative, after he had worked fourteen hours, had nothing to look forward to but his grog.

That is why I say, lift a man, give him life, let him work eight hours a day, give him the school, develop his taste for music, give him a garden, give him beautiful things to see, and good books to read, and you will starve out those lower appetites. Give a man a chance to earn a good living, and you may save his life. So it is with women in prostitution. Poverty is the road to it; it is this that makes them the prey of the wealth and the leisure of another class. Give a hundred men in this country good wages and eight hours work, and ninety-nine will disdain to steal. Give a hundred women a good chance to get a good living, and ninety-nine of them will disdain to barter their virtue for gold.

You will find in our criminal institutions to-day a great many men with big brains, who ought to have risen in the world,--perhaps gone to Congress. You may laugh, but I tell you the biggest brains don't go to Congress. Now, take a hundred criminals: ten of them will be smart men; but take the remainder, and eighty of them are below the average, body and mind,--they were, as Charles Lamb said, never brought up; they were dragged up. They never had any fair chance; they were starved in body and mind. It is like a chain weak in one link; the moment temptation came, it went over. Now, just so long as you hold two thirds of this nation on a narrow, superficial line, you feed the criminal classes.

Any man that wants to grapple with the Labor Question must know how you will secure a fair division of production. No man answers that question.

I hail the Labor movement for two reasons; and one is, that it is my only hope for democracy. At the time of the Antislavery agitation, I was not sure whether we should come out of the struggle with one republic or two; but republics 1 knew we should still be. I am not so confident, indeed, that we shall come out of this storm as a republic, unless the Labor movement succeeds. Take a power like the Pennsylvania Central Railroad and the New York Central Railroad, and there is no legislative independence that can exist in its sight. As well expect a green vine to flourish in a dark cellar as to expect honesty to exist under the shadow of those upastrees. Unless there is a power in your movement, industrially and politically, the last knell of democratic liberty in this Union is struck; for as I said, there is no power in one State to resist such a giant as the Pennsylvania road. We have thirty-eight one-horse legislatures in this country; and we have got a man like Tom Scott, with three hundred and fifty million dollars in his hands; and, if he walks through the States, they have no power. Why, he need not move at all. If he smokes, as Grant does, a puff of the waste smoke out of his mouth upsets the legislature.

Now, there is nothing but the rallying of men against money that can contest with that power. Rally industrially if you will; rally for eight hours, for a little division of profits, for co-operation; rally for such a banking-power in the government as would give us money at three per cent.

Only organize, and stand together. Claim something together, and at once; let the nation hear a united demand from the laboring voice, and then, when you have got that, go on after another; but get something.

I say, let the debts of the country be paid, abolish the banks, and let the government lend every Illinois farmer (if he wants it), who is now borrowing money at ten per cent, money on the half-value of his land at three per cent. The same policy that gave a million acres to the Pacific Railroad, because it was a great national effort, will allow of our lending Chicago twenty millions of money, at three per cent, to rebuild it.

From Boston to New Orleans, from Mobile to Rochester, from Baltimore to St. Louis, we have now but one purpose; and that is, having driven all other political questions out of the arena, having abolished slavery, the only question left is labor,--the relations of capital and labor. The night before Charles Sumner left Boston for Washington the last time, he said to me, I have just one more thing to do for the negro,--to carry the Civil Rights Bill; and after that is passed, I shall be at liberty to take up the question of labor.

Now, one word in conclusion. If you do your duty, -and by that I mean standing together and being true to each other,--the Presidental election you will decide, every State election you may decide if you please.

If you want power in this country; if you want to make yourselves felt; if you do not want your children to wait long years before they have the bread on the table they ought to have, the leisure in their lives they ought to have, the opportunities in life they ought to have; if you don't want to wait yourselves,--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. You may go down on your knees, and say, I am sorry I did the act; and we will say, It will avail you in heaven, but on this side of the grave never. So that a man, in taking up the Labor Question, will know he is dealing with a hair-trigger pistol, and will say, I am to be true to justice and to man; otherwise I am a dead duck.

Address before the Legislative Committee, February 28, 1865.

Gentlemen of the committee: The question you have to consider at this time grows out of the question of Temperance,--the interference with the sale, the public sale, of intoxicating drinks. It is not a new question. What we call the Temperance cause in this Commonwealth is half a century old; and on the other side of the water, if you analyze strictly the legislation of the old countries, the attempt to limit and prohibit, to a certain extent, in the cause of public protection, the free use and sale of intoxicating liquor, is many centuries old. The new point in the discussion is, that any man should assume that a government trespasses on the rights of individuals when it attempts, at last, to legislate on this subject. I think I may safely say, that there is no statute-book in the world, no matter how old its first page is,--no statute-book since the discovery of alcohol,--which has not in it a law in regard to this subject; and if you go behind the Christian era, and into the legislation of the older countries, the same attempt is visible, I think, there. We are not, therefore, trying to gain or clutch any new ground; we are only examining the method by which an old and constantly acknowledged power shall be used.

Again, some men say the Temperance cause is a very narrow, petty, sentimental enterprise, fit for half-witted men, weak-minded women, theorists, but utterly repudiated by the manly and practical intellect and commonsense of the public. On the contrary, to my mind, the Temperance cause is one of the weightiest, broadest, most momentous, that a citizen, under democratic institutions, can contemplate,--especially under democratic institutions here, and leading a race like ours.

Every race, every blood, every climate, has its own special temptation. The tropics have one, the colder climates have another. Some races are distinguished from others by peculiar temptation and weakness. Our climate, our blood, is peculiarly open to the necessity of material stimulus, something that shall wake up and hurry the currents of the blood. The old idea of heaven, to the fathers of our race, was a drunken revel, overflowing with mead and every intoxicating drink. The race craves these stimulants naturally, and still more incidentally,--from the fast life, from the incessant activity, from the hurried and excited nature which modern life gives us,--from some special need of the body itself.

That is our temptation. Again, science, in modern times, has elaborated the processes of manufacturing intoxicating liquor to such a cheap and lavish extent, that a man with one hour's work may be drunk a day; with one-half day's toil may spread his drunkenness over a week. And yet, with this blood, and with science holding out this temptation, and wages holding out these means, and the heavy working of republican institutions resting on the basis of the people themselves, with no breakwater of bayonet or of despotism,--the sense, virtue, purpose of the masses, the pedestal upon which the great, heavy machine of government must be built, --with these yawning gulfs on each side our national progress, there are men who set their faces against the Temperance agitation, and bid us beware of taking up too much time with the narrow and petty interest which we assume to champion! A drunken people were never the safe depositaries of the power of self-government. Hurried on, the mere victims of demagogues, uncontrollable passion their temptation and their guide, who can safely trust his future and the institutions secured by such toil and such blood, to a race making or groping its way amid such evils and such weakness? I contend that every man who desires the security of democratic institutions is to see to it, first of all, that every possible means be exhausted to secure, so far as human means can, a sober people. To my mind, that is the significance of the Temperance enterprise. I know its other phases, alluded to by my friend, Rev. A. A. Miner, who has just stood here,--the domestic desolation, the individual ruin, the spiritual wreck, the pecuniary loss, the family destruction. I know all that; and to the right mind, there lies the real strength of the Temperance agitation. But if any man is of too low a level, too sordid a logic to appreciate or acknowledge that argument, at least citizenship and patriotism, at least selfishness may be brought, for one moment, to reflect, when the very ground around him rests secure only so long as the statute-book is upborne, and the rights of life and property secured by a sober people.

The. question which we meet to discuss to-night is one of this nature,--whether this great principle is to have a fair trial? Mark me! That is my text,--Whether this great principle is to have in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts a fair trial? That is all we ask. Boston is a part of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. The law that prevails in Boston is made in yonder statehouse and recorded in the statute-book of the Commonwealth. The question to be asked in regard to such law is, whether the public opinion of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts demands it? If that opinion does, then Boston has one duty, and but one,--to obey it. Is there anything undemocratic in that? Is there any breach of municipal or individual liberty in that? Has Boston seceded from Berkshire? I contend that Boston is a part of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and bound to obey her law. Now, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, after thirty years of discussion, after the most exhaustive debate, after statistics piled mountain high on both sides, after every other method has been tried and has failed, has decided that what is called the Maine Liquor Law shall be the law of the Commonwealth.

That is not sentiment, that is a fact. If you doubt it, go to the Secretary of State's office and get a certified copy. That is an indisputable fact, that the Commonwealth of Massachusetts has deliberately chosen this method of carrying out her Temperance purpose.

Does any man say it is not a good method? My friend, that is not admissible. We have floated beyond that level of argument. The liquor dealers say it is not a good method. You are out of order! Sit down! You do not belong to this stage of discussion! Mark you! We have funded thirty years of labor in that statute which the Governor has signed and the Secretary of State has sealed. When it was first enacted, the liquor dealers of the State did not like it. They went to the legislature, but the legislature stood unmoved. Having failed there, they went to the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court, after thorough investigation, said, It is law! How far, then, have the Temperance people travelled? Let us stop, and take an inventory. We have a law on the statute-book. We have a reiterated decision of the legislature, that that is their sober, second purpose. We have further the decision of the Supreme Court that it is constitutional. So far we have got. Now, what comes next? The various elements that go to make up the State are to obey it, are they not? Here is our claim; if you do not like it, go back into the arena, and agitate against it. Get up your tracts, your circulars, your lectures, your public conventions, and assail the Gibraltar of the legislature; and when you have carried it, we will sit down and put our hands on our lips. There is where we demand that the liquor interest shall meet us,--in the convention, in the lecture-room, anywhere,--to agitate against the law. We are ready to meet them. We went through thirty years of such agitation. We tried license, we tried the fifteen-gallon law,--every method,--and we failed.

Let me turn aside to say one word here. The chief of police said, in 1863, that he thought it would be a good thing to have a license system. Well, our argument is, Gentlemen, we tried it for two hundred years, and it failed. Do let us try this fifty years. Is that an unfair demand?

From the method in which gentlemen address us, one would suppose that there never was a State that tried licensing; that it was a new thought, just struck out from some happy intellect, elevated by a glass of champagne [laughter and applause]; whereas license is as old as Plymouth Rock. The Commonwealth began with it, and they came up to the year 1855; and every philanthropist, every lover of his country and his city, was pale and aghast at the gigantic strides which this vice was making,--at the tremendous yawning gulf in which all public virtue seemed about to be swallowed up. Pulpit, forum, legislatures counting-house,--every walk of life, public and private, was rotten to the very core. Now, therefore, what we have gained is a law reiterated. We have got the court and the legislature on our side; what further do we ask? Well, in tie various counties of the State, more or less direct and honest effort has been made to carry out the law. We do not stop to say how honest or how direct; that is not our business tonight. Our business is with the fact, that in this city no effort has ever been made to carry it out; and in saying that I am not throwing any particular blame on any individual officer. Tie mayor and the aldermen are as good as the average; our police agents and subordinates are not open to exception. It is not the machine, it is the creator of the machine with whom we quarrel. It is not the police nor the mayor, but it is the elements that make both.

The reasons why no effort has been made, are plain enough on the very surface of affairs. They were alluded to by my friend, Rev. Dr. Miner, just now. Nineteen hundred and fifty-one places in this city, where, illegally, liquor is sold, in open defiance of the law; eight or ten millions of dollars on this peninsula invested in the manufacture and sale of liquor; two or three million dollars' worth sold and consumed annually in the city itself. Every man familiar with the machinery of democratic institutions knows that two thousand men, with ten millions of dollars behind them, commanding from three to seven thousand votes, as they readily may, can hold the balance in any election, and make it beyond question that no candidate can ever be ventured by either party, who is not pledged, publicly or privately, not to execute this law of the State. Every man knows that that power, thus massed up, can control the municipal government of the city of Boston. But we are not now finding fault with this state of things. We only say that in consequence of that, or of something else, the city of Boston says to us by the voice of her attorneys, her aldermen, her mayor, We cannot execute your law. We take her at her word. Year after year she comes to the legislature and says, We cannot execute your law. Well, there are two paths open,--one path is, Repeal the law; the other path is, Try somebody else to execute it. Suppose the engineer of the Fitchburg road should report to the directors, I can't run your engine beyond Groton. Two courses would be open for the directors. One would be to take up the rails west of Groton, the other to get a new engineer. Which do you suppose they would adopt? [Applause.] The city of Boston says to the Commonwealth,--a Commonwealth that after thirty years of discussion, after two hundred years of patient experiment, announces a new plan, a plan successful to a marvellous extent elsewhere,--the city of Boston says, We cannot execute your law. We take her at her word, and we proceed to do,--what? Why, to go back to the armory of democratic weapons to find whether democracy has any other means of carrying out a law.

Now, mark you, what is a city? It is a body of inhabitants selected from the rest of the State, which assembles together and goes to the legislature and says, Grant us a city government. Why do they want it? They say, We have large masses of criminal inhabitants, large, massed — up quantities of wealth; we need a more stringent machinery than a country town. The State says, Yes; take that city charter, and with it take certain conditions and privileges and rights peculiar to a city. Now, the tendency of the last hundred years has been to what you may call no government,--that is, toward making the government light as possible; filing down all its powers, restricting all its old despotic qualities. That is the tendency of our day. You see it everywhere. We give to wards, to towns, and to small districts unlimited control of their own affairs. In the well-educated, sparsely-populated, comparatively poor districts of Massachusetts, it succeeds. Education and virtue supply the place of force and compulsion. We have tried the-same policy with the city. We have given to it the exclusive execution of the State laws. It was not so forty years ago; the city was then a town in the county of Suffolk; the State sent its own sheriff and its own deputy sheriffs, appointed by itself, not by vote, to execute its laws. You know the city has two codes,--its own by-laws, and also the laws of the State. Its own by-laws were always executed by itself. Half a century ago, the State laws were executed by State officials.

We have gradually tended toward giving to the city the whole control of the State laws also; and to-day (a fact, probably, of which not one in ten in this audience is aware), the police of Boston are engaged three quarters of their time, and more, in the execution, not of city laws, but of State laws, of laws which, half a century ago, would have largely been in the hands of the sheriff and his deputies, appointed by the State. We have gone thus far.

Now, like all other grants, the State may resume this.

The reason why she should resume it is, because the city goes to the state-house, year by year, and says:

We cannot execute your laws.

An Address before the Association of the Ministers of the Methodist Episcopal Church, in Tremont Temple, Boston, January 24, 1881. This is the only address in this volume which was read from manuscript, and probably the only one Mr. Phillips ever delivered in that manner.

I am to offer you some remarks on a lecture delivered here a fortnight ago by Chancellor Crosby. He denounced the Temperance movement as now conducted. The address was not very remarkable for novelty, or weight of argument, or the correctness of its statements. Indeed, it was rather noticeable for the lack of these qualities. And it was so well handled and so fully answered in several of our pulpits that I thought it needed no further notice. But you thought otherwise, and perhaps it does deserve it, considering the source from which it comes. And when the health of the chancellor becomes the standing toast in the grog-shops of our city, and when the journal which publishes these Monday lectures is obliged to print a second and third edition, day after day, to supply that class of customers, it is evident that Temperance men have a text on which an effectual Temperance sermon can be preached,--one that will probably arrest the attention of just those we seek to reach.

Dr. Crosby laments the divisions among Temperance men, and lays it down as a principle that we cannot conscientiously object to the means employed by others, unless they contain an immorality. I beg leave to dissent from this. We have had sixty years experience in Temperance methods, and certainly may claim to have learned something. Now, when these new converts-these nursling babies of grace-mislead by their crude suggestions the Temperance public, obstruct its efforts and waste its means, are we bound to sit silent and make no protest against such waste and recklessness? The treasury of reform is not rich enough to bear such extravagance on the pretence of harmony; much less are we bound to silence when a neighbor's mistake seriously harms and hinders the movement. If Boston lived, as it did in 1806, with no steam fire-engine,--only leather buckets hanging in each man's front entry,--cheerfully would I stand with Dr. Crosby and a hundred more to pass buckets of water up to the firemen on a burning building. But in 1881, I should not obstruct the engine, and crowd it out of its place, merely that Dr. Crosby and I might have a chance harmoniously to unite in passing empty buckets toward the flames. Life is too short for such false courtesies; too short for us to postpone working on our line until we have educated every new convert up to our level. This might do very well before the Flood. as Sydney Smith suggests, when Methuselah could consult his friends for a hundred and fifty years in relation to an intended enterprise, and even when live to see the working of his plan, and its success or failure, for six or seven centuries afterward.

But life now is limited to an average of seventy years, and practical men must put their hands to the plough in the best way they know, and if children stand in their way, move them gently but firmly out of the path.

I think before Dr. Crosby spoke he should have studied the history of the Temperance movement. If he were as familiar with the literature of our enterprise as he is with that of Greece, he never would have repeated criticisms and suggestions that have been answered over and over again during the last fifty years. As I turn over his essay, and find how tediously familiar we all are with his objections, I am reminded of Johnson's objection to Goldsmith's plan of travelling over Asia in order to bring home valuable improvements: Sir, Goldsmith is so ignorant of his own country that he would bring home a wheelbarrow as a new and valuable invention.

The address turns back on its path frequently, and repeats its chief criticisms again and again. If we analyze it, I think it may be fairly summed up thus:--

1. Dr. Crosby objects to the Total-abstinence theory and movement that it insults the example of Jesus; that its advocates undermine and despise the Bible, while they strain and wrench it to serve their purpose; and he asserts that the Total-abstinence system is contrary to revealed religion ; and that the Bible, correctly interpreted, repudiates total abstinence and such a Temperance crusade as has existed here for the last fifty years.

2. Dr. Crosby objects to this movement as immoral as well as unchristian; and as doing unmeasured harm to the community. He considers it as the special and direct cause of the growth of drunkenness in our land, and of a general demoralization among religious communities; asserts that it is exactly the kind of movement that rumsellers enjoy, and that it ought not to succeed, never will, and never can.

3. The pledge is unmanly, and kills character and self-respect.

4. The assertion that moderate drinking leads to drunkenness is untrue.

5. The total-abstainers bully and intimidate the community, and disgust all good, sensible men.

6. That what is needed to unite sensible men in a movement sure to succeed, is a license system recognizing the distinction between moderation and excess, between harmless wines, and beer and strong drink. Such a system, free from taint of prejudice, and instinct with practical wisdom, will establish order and peace, and save us from a moral slough.

The looseness of these statements is noticeable. Dr. Crosby says, The Total-abstinence system is contrary to revealed religion.

What is the Total-abstinence system ? It is abstaining from intoxicating drink ourselves, and agreeing with others to do so. How is this contrary to revealed religion? Can any one cite a text in the Bible or a principle laid down there which forbids it? Of course not; no one pretends that he can. But Dr. Crosby's argument is, that Jesus drank intoxicating wine and allowed it to others. There is no proof that he ever did drink intoxicating wine. But let that pass, and suppose, for the sake of the argument, that he did. What then? To do what Jesus never did, or to refuse to do what he did, are such acts necessarily contrary to revealed religion ? Let us see.

Jesus rode upon an ass and a colt, the foal of an ass. We find it convenient to use railways. Are they contrary to revealed religion ? Jesus never married, neither did most of his apostles. Is marriage, therefore, contrary to revealed religion ? Jesus allowed a husband to put away his wife if she had committed adultery, he himself being judge and executioner. We forbid him to do it, and make him submit to jury trial and a judge's decision. Are such divorce laws, therefore, contrary to revealed religion ? Jesus said to the person guilty of adultery: Go and sin no more. We send such sinners to the State prison. Are our laws punishing adultery, therefore, contrary to revealed religion ? There were no women at the Last Supper. We admit them to it. Is this contrary to revealed religion ? We see, therefore, that Christians may, in altered circumstances, do some things Jesus never actually did, and that their so doing does not necessarily contravene his example; nor, unless it violates the principles he taught, does it tend to undermine Christianity.

But the learned lecturer will perhaps urge: I did not mean exactly what I said. I meant to point out that the means you use — methods with which you urge and support the Total-abstinence theory — are contrary to revealed religion. You strain and pervert the Bible to get the example of Jesus on your side, and so undermine the authority of the Scriptures.

It would have been better if Dr. Crosby had originally said exactly what he meant, and on so grave a subject we had a right to claim that a trained and scholarly man should do so. But, waiving that, let us allow him, as the courts do, to amend his declaration.

The Total-abstinence system is contrary to revealed religion, because we strain and distort the Scriptures and wrest them to serve our purpose; and the chief instance upon which the Doctor mainly dwells is our assertion that wherever drinking wine is referred to in the Bible with approbation, unfermented wine is meant. Upon this claim the Doctor pours out his hottest indignation, indulging in a wealth of abusive epithets, and returning to it again and again, ringing changes on it, and turning it like a specially sweet morsel under his tongue. Indeed, this may be considered the chief thing he came to Boston to say.

Now, there is a class of Biblical scholars and interpreters who do assert that wherever wine is referred to in the Bible with approbation, it is unfermented wine. Of this class of men, Dr. Crosby says their learned ignorance is splendid; they are inventors of a theory of magnificent daring; they use false texts and deceptive arguments; deal dishonestly with the Scriptures; beg the question and build on air; their theory is a fable, born of falsehoods, supported by Scripture twisting and wriggling; their arguments are cobwebs, and their zeal outstrips their judgment, and they plan to undermine the Bible.

This is a fearful indictment! Who are these daring, ridiculous, and illogical sinners? As I call them up in my memory, the first one who comes to me is Moses Stuart, of Andover, whose lifelong study of the Bible and profound critical knowledge of both its languages place him easily at the head of all American commentators. His well-balanced mind, conservative to a fault on many points, clears him from any suspicion of being misled by enthusiasm or warping his opinions to suit novel theories. Moses Stuart's Scripture view of the wine question was the ablest contribution, thirty years ago, to this claim about unfermented wine, and it still holds its place, unanswered and unanswerable. By his side stands Dr. Nott, the head of Union College, with the snows of ninety winters on his brow. Around them gather scores of scholars and divines on both sides of the Atlantic. In our day Tayler Lewis gives to the American public, with his scholarly indorsement, the exhaustive commentary by Dr. Lees on every text in the Bible which speaks of wine,--a work of sound learning, the widest research, and fairest argument.

The ripe scholarship, long study of the Bible, and critical ability of these men entitle them to be considered experts on this question. In a matter of Scripture interpretation it would be empty compliment to say that Dr. Crosby is worthy to loose the latchet of their shoes. You would think me using only sarcasm if I said so.

Now, imagine Moses Stuart, with his learned ignorance, using false texts, dealing dishonestly with the Scriptures, begging a question and using cobwebs for arguments, wriggling and twisting the Bible ; at the ripe age of sixty years his boyish zeal outstripping his judgment, --imagine him, with his infidel pick axe, zealously digging away up there on Andover Hill to undermine the Bible ! Of course all Andover will at once recognize the fidelity of the portrait, and cordially thank the New York Greek professor for informing them of his discovery of this Stuart conspiracy with Dr. Nott to bring the authority of the Scriptures into contempt.

One thing Dr. Crosby wishes to be distinctly understood: he does not charge such men as Stuart with meaning to lie. I Their main arguments are falsehoods. They take up these weapons without sufficiently examining them. They see they can be made effective, but do not stop to inquire whether they are legitimate. Now, this is very kind in our New York professor. We had never discovered the superficial character of Stuart's scholarship, which left him open to such mistakes, or his mischievous haste and culpable carelessness in logical methods, and it is very generous in this new Daniel to assure us that, in spite of these faults, he can [with effort, of course, and some struggle] believe in the purity of motive of such men, even when they trample on reason and Scripture in blind rush.

Now, the truth is, the only castle built on air in this matter is the baseless idea that the Temperance movement uses dishonest arguments or wrests the Scripture, because it maintains that where the drinking of wine as an article of diet is mentioned in the Bible with approbation, unfermented wine is meant. The fact is, there are scholars of repute on both sides of the question; but we do not claim too much when we say that the weight of scholarly authority is on our side, and not on that of the Doctor.

But suppose the weight on each side were equal, what then? One theory makes the Bible contradict itself, puts it below the sacred books of many other nations in the strictness of its morality, and sets it as an obstacle to the highest civilization.

The other reconciles all its teachings one with another, lifts it to the level of the highest moral idea, and makes it the inspirer and the guide in all noble efforts to elevate the race. Which theory ought the believer in the Bible to prefer, if both were equally well supported? Are those who degrade the Bible below other scriptures entitled to charge us with undermining it? There are other claims besides that of unfermented wine which are magnificent in their daring and, let me add, in their insolence.

Some of the Doctor's young hearers might have been surprised to see a divine flinging the Bible in the way of the Temperance movement. But we older ones and Abolitionists are used to such attempts. Forty-five years ago the Princeton Review, representing the Presbyterian Church, denounced the Antislavery movementat a time when Garrison stood surrounded by divines and church-members without number — as infidel and contrary to revealed religion. Its argument was the exact counterpart of Dr. Crosby's against our Temperance enterprise. In vain we showed that the word slave in the New Testament did not necessarily or probably mean a chattel slave, and in vain did Weld's Bible argument --which was never answered — prove the same to be true of the Old Testament. Still, we were denounced as --twisting and wresting and straining the Scriptures, and undermining the Bible. This Crosby Bible was flung in Garrison's face for thirty years. But since his great hand wrote Righteousness on the flag, and sent it down to the Gulf, and since we boast that no slave treads our soil,--since then nine hundred and ninety-nine church-members out of every thousand will call you a libeller and suspect you of infidelity if you say the Bible anywhere or in any degree upholds slavery; and I see your lecturer last week closed his eloquent and able address by triumphantly claiming that the Gospel abolished slavery,--which is true, only he should have stated that it was the Gospel of Jesus Christ, and not the gospel of the Church of that day.

Hence, I am not impatient nor distrustful. I rest quiet in serene assurance that by and by, when our Temperance cause is a little stronger, men will blush to think they ever belittled and dishonored the Bible by such claims and arguments as these. At that time ninety-nine out of every hundred Christians will look askance upon you, and suspect your Orthodoxy, unless you believe Jesus never drank any fermented wine, and that the Bible's precepts touching wine-drinking can only be reconciled with each other, or with its claim as a revealed religion, by recognizing the distinction between fermented and unfermented wines. In my active life of fifty years I have seen more men made infidels by these attempts to prove the Bible an upholder of slavery, than I ever saw misled by the followers of Paine; and I think this sad exhibition of New York partisanship will have the same result. The misled men to whom I refer, were not ignorant, careless-minded, or unprincipled, but men of conscientious earnestness of purpose, good culture, and blameless lives.

It is, indeed, mournful to look back and notice how uniformly narrow-minded men, hide-bound in the bark of tradition, conventionalism, and prejudice, have thrown the Bible in the way of every forward step the race has ever made. When the Reformation claimed that every Christian man was his own priest and entitled to read the Bible for himself, the cry was: You are resisting and undermining the Bible. Even before that, the most advanced and liberal churchmen denounced their own (unrecognized, but true) spiritual brothers — the democracy of their day in Holland and elsewhere — as infidels and contemners of the Scriptures.

When the English Puritan saw dimly a republican equality of rights, Sir Robert Filmer and the High-Churchmen tried to frighten him with the scarecrow of their Bible. The chief Apostle says, Honor the king! and this fellow leaves us no king to honor! But even Dr. Crosby would, in spite of Saint Peter, hardly acknowledge the Declaration of Independence to be contrary to revealed religion.

One of the strongest proofs that the Bible is really a divine book is, that it has outlived even the foolish praises and misrepresentations of its narrow and bigoted friends.

When Antislavery lecturers first entered Ohio, some forty years ago, they carried the Bible before them as their sanction for the movement. Certain doctors of divinity, horror-struck at this profanation, proposed to form a society whose object should be to prove that the Bible sanctioned slavery. Ben Wade was then considered somewhat of an infidel; but on the principle of the forlorn sailor who puts up with any port in a storm, these divines sought out Wade, asking him to be president of the proposed society. Wade received them most courteously. Certainly, said he, gentlemen, I will serve you gladly, and do my best to make this thing a success. But, you know, when we've proved that the Bible supports and demands slavery as an institution, folks will ask you to show them what is the worth of such a Bible, here and now. And in that matter I cannot be of any help to you, gentlemen, at all.

But some adherent of Dr. Crosby may say: Still, the New Testament does not anywhere specifically and in so many words describe a system of moral observance like Teetotalism. Possibly not; and hence the Doctor claims that this suiting Christianity to the needs of the age is disguised infidelity.

But look at it a moment. The New Testament is a small book, and may be read in an hour. It is not a code of laws, but the example of a life and a suggestion of principles. It would be idle to suppose that it could describe in detail, specifically meet every possible question, and solve every difficulty that the changing and broadening life of two or three thousand years might bring forth. The progressive spirit of each age has found in it just the inspiration and help it sought. But when timid, narrow, and short-sighted men claimed such exclusive ownership in it that they refused to their growing fellows the use of its broad, underlying principles, and thus demanded to have new wine put into old bottles, of course the bottles burst and their narrow, surface Bible became discredited; but the real Bible soared upward, and led the world onward still, as the soul rises to broader and higher life when the burden of a narrow and mortal body falls away.

This is that kind of literal and starved ignorance which lays its unworthy hand on the Scriptures, and tells us that, because Solomon said, He that spareth the rod spoileth the child, he meant every child must be mercilessly whipped; thus dragging down the wisest of men to the level of their own narrow and brutal nature, ignorant that the poet-king, putting the concrete for the principle involved, meant only to emphasize the truth that the training of a child must include subjection,--by what method obtained each case and each child's nature must decide. And thus many a brute and ignoramus has complacently fathered his absurd blindness and passionate temper on Solomon and the Bible.

Had not the lecturer of last week, Dr. Crooks, so ably and eloquently pointed out this characteristic of Christianity, its opening to the moral and spiritual need of each age, its ready and complete adaptation of itself to the most unforeseen and immense changes in the moral life of succeeding ages,--one of the proofs of its divine origin,--furnishing the principles needed for each larger development of civilization, and giving its sanction to the new methods which keener temptations and more threatening dangers demanded, I might have troubled you with something on this point. You will allow me to quote what will show you that even the old divines, and those whose Orthodoxy will not be suspected, have again and again affirmed that a moral agency's being new was no evidence at all that Christianity did not include and intend it. Robinson, in Address to the Pilgrim fathers, says:--

If God reveal anything to you by any other instrument of his, be as ready to receive it as ever you were to receive any truth by my ministry; for I am verily persuaded — I am very confident — the Lord hath more truth yet to break forth out of his Holy Word.

The Hon. Robert Boyle (1680) says:--

As the Bible was not written for any one particular time or people, . . . so there are many passages very useful which will not l)be found so these many ages; being possibly reserved by the Prophetic Spirit that indited them . . . to quell some foreseen heresy, . . . or resolve some yet unformed doubts, or confound some error that hath not yet a name.

Bishop Butler, in his Analogy (1737) says:--

Nor is it at all incredible that a Book which has been so long in the possession of mankind, should yet contain many truths as yet undiscovered. For all the same phenomena and the same faculties of investigation from which such great discoveries in natural knowledge have been made in the present and last age, were equally in the possession of mankind several thousand years before. And possibly it might be intended that events, as they come to pass, should open and ascertain the meaning of several parts of Scripture.

The Interpreter (1862) says:--

A day is coming when Scripture, long darkened by traditional teaching, too frequently treated as an exhaustive mine, will at length be recognized in its true character, as a field rich in unexplored wealth, and consequently be searched afresh for its hidden treasures.

Vinet, in his Lectures, says--

Even now, after eighteen centuries of Christianity, we may be involved in some tremendous error of which the Christianity of the future will make us ashamed.

Dean Stanley says:--

Each age of the Church has, as it were, turned over a new leaf in the Bible, and found a response to its own wants. We have a leaf still to turn,--a leaf not the less new because it is so simple.

Dr. Crosby passes to the great weapon of the Temperance movement,--the pledge. This he calls unmanly, a strait-jacket; says it kills self-respect and undermines all character.

Hannah More said: We cannot expect perfection in any one; but we may demand consistency of every one.

It does not tend to show the sincerity of these critics of our cause when we find them objecting in us to what they themselves uniformly practise on all other occasions. If we continue to believe in their sincerity, it can only be at the expense of their intelligence. Dr. Crosby is, undoubtedly, a member of a church. Does he mean to say that when his church demanded his signature to its creed and his pledge to obey its discipline, it asked what it was unmanly in him to grant, and what destroys an individual's character; that his submission to this is foregoing his reasoning, sinking back to his nonage, etc? Of course he assents to none of these things. He only objects to a Temperance pledge, not to a church pledge.

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?

I have known men who, borrowing money, refused to sign any promissory note. They thought it unmanly and evidence chat I distrusted them. Does Dr. Crosby think the world should change its customs and immediately adopt that plan?

Society rests in all its transactions on the idea that a solemn promise, pledge, assertion, strengthens and assures the act. It recognizes this principle of human nature. 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 to no other,--these and a score more of instances can be cited. In any final analysis all these rest on the same principle as the Temperance pledge. No man ever denounced them as unmanly. I sent this month a legacy to a literary institution, on certain conditions, and received in return its pledge that the money should ever be sacredly used as directed. 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.

These cobweb theories, born of isolated cloister life, do not bear exposure to the midday sun or the rude winds of practical life. This is not a matter of theory. It must be tested and settled by experience and results. Thousands and tens of thousands attest the value of the pledge. It never degraded; it only lifted them to a higher life. Unmanly ? No. It made men of them. We who never lost our clear eyesight or level balance over books, but who stand mixed up and jostled in daily life, hardly..deem any man's sentimental and fastidious criticism of the pledge worth answering. Every active worker in the Temperance cause can recall hundreds of instances where it has been a man's salvation.

In a railway-car once, a man about sixty years old came to sit beside me. He had heard me lecture the evening before on Temperance. 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 a 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, 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.

My companion took it, and he added: It has saved me. I have a fine ship, wife and children at home, and I have helped others.

How far that little candle threw its beams! That anxious mother on a Vermont hillside saved two men to virtue and usefulness; how many more, He who sees all can alone tell.

But our agitation of the Drink Question is bulldozing and intimidation. This is only an unmanly whine. What is the pulpit? Does it not take admitted truths and press them home on conscience? Or does it not seek to prove principles the listener does not admit, and then urge him to their practice? Does it not criticise and affirm and denounce, seeking to waken the indifferent, convince the doubting, and claim consistent action of all? Does it wait until the sinner acknowledges its principles before it denounces his action as a sin? By no means. Is church discipline visited only on those who see and confess their sins? Is it not used to rouse them to a sense of the principle they will not acknowledge, and hold them up to the rebuke and take from them the respect of their fellows? If our Temperance agitation is intimidation, then nine tenths of the land's pulpits are bulldozers, and the other tenth is useless. What does the Bible say of those who prophesy smooth things, and whose order was Nathan obeying when he said, Thou art the man ?

I have known even a Greek professor, when speaking in downright earnest, fling about the keenest and roughest words in :;he dictionary in the most reckless and biting manner;

As illustrating Dr. Crosby's calmness, the Chicago Advance says: A collection of the dynamic complimentary phrases applied by this calm lecturer to the main body of Temperance people of America would make a curious paragraph. Here are some specimens: Mere obstinacy of opinion and personal pride ; what a fearful prostitution of a noble word is seen in the use of the word temperance to-day! a false flag seized by radical and intemperate souls which will disgust and alienate true and enlightened souls; these infatuated defenders of the Total-abstinence principle ; these great untruths that are flaunted on its banners will disgust most men that have brains and use them; its spirit of intimidation and bulldozing, the invariable accompaniment of it during its forty years curriculum ; overbearing and tyrannical, using a violence of language that can admit of no excuse; whose principal agencies have been falsehood and intimidation ; whose principles are at war with proper manliness or self-respect; upon the Total-abstinence system I charge the growth of drunkenness in our land and a general demoralization among religious communities; moral jugglery, a blunder that has the proportions of a crime; of the pledge, a most pernicious instrument for debauching the conscience, always an injury and never a help; the wild bashi-bazouks of controversy etc., etc.

Dr. Crosby says it is false, our constant assertion that moderate drinking makes drunkards. Will he please tell us where, then, the drunkards come from? Certainly teetotalers do not recruit these swelling ranks. Will he please account for the million-times-repeated story of the broken-hearted and despairing sot, and of the reformed man, that moderate drinking lulled them to a false security until the chain was too strong for them to break ? Will he please explain that confession forced from old Sam Johnson, and repeated hundreds of times since by men of seemingly strong resolve: I can abstain; I can't be moderate ?

Do not the Bible, the writers of fiction, the master dramatists of ancient and modern times; the philosopher, the moralist, the man of affairs,--do not all these bear witness how insidiously the habits of sensual indulgence creep on their victim, until he wakes to find himself in chains of iron, his very will destroyed?

When Milton says, I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary, Dr. Crosby, you suppose, interprets it as meaning that boys should frequent gambling-hells and such resorts, in order to prove their strength of resistance. But no; he does not mean any such thing. He only thinks they should face the drink temptation; none other. When you hear that the New York Central Railway prohibits the sale of flash literature in its cars, perhaps you expect to hear Dr. Crosby denounce that corporation as emasculating the virtues of their travellers and making them unmanly. Not at all. He approves it. It is only drink temptations that he considers good training for heroic men.