Wendell Phillips, Theodore C. Pease, Speeches, Lectures and Letters of Wendell Phillips: Volume 1

[50] but surrounded by twenty millions, whose opinion is omnipotent,--that the hundred gathered in a New England school-house may be the hundred who shall teach the rising men of the other half of the continent, and stereotype Freedom on the banks of the Pacific; remembering and worshipping reverentially the great American idea of the Omnipotence of “thinking men,” of the “sentiment of justice,” against which no throne is potent enough to stand, no Constitution sacred enough to endure. Remember this, when you go to an antislavery gathering in a school-house, and know that, weighed against its solemn purpose, its terrible resolution, its earnest thought, Webster himself, and all huckstering statesmen, in the opposite scale, shall kick the beam. Worshipping the tongue, let us be willing, at all times, to be known throughout the community as the all-talk party. The age of bullets is over. The age of men armed in mail is over. The age of thrones has gone by. The age of statesmen-God be praised I such statesmen — is over. The age of thinking men has come. With the aid of God, then, every man I can reach I will set thinking on the subject of slavery. [Cheers.] The age of reading men has come. I will try to imbue every newspaper with Garrisonianism. [Loud applause.] The age of the masses has come. Now, Daniel Webster counts one. Give him joy of it!-but the “rub-a-dub agitation” counts at least twenty,--nineteen better. Nineteen, whom no chance of nomination tempts to a change of opinions once a twelve-month; who need no Kossuth advent to recall them to their senses.

What I want to impress you with is, the great weight that is attached to the opinion of everything that can call itself a man. Give me anything that walks erect, and can read, and he shall count one in the millions of the Lord's sacramental host, which is yet to come up and trample all oppression in the dust. The weeds poured forth in nature's