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

Everybody speculates, the pulpit affirms, the merchant guesses, and the oracular press lays down the law. Why should not the lyceum be in the fashion? To begin, then, at home. For the first time within my memory we have got a man for Governor of Massachusetts, a frank, true, whole-souled, honest man. [Cheering.] That gain alone is worth all the labor. But the office is not the most important in the Commonwealth; only now and then it becomes commanding; in a sad Burns week, for instance, when Mr. Washburn was masquerading as Governor, and when, as Emerson said, “if we had a man, and not a cockade, in the chair, something might be done” ; or, later, when the present Chief Magistrate pushed Judge Loring, on false pretences, from his stool. Such occasions remind us we have a Governor. But in common times, the Chief Justiceship is far more commanding,--is the real Gibraltar of our State contests. John A. Andrew should have been Chief Justice. [Applause.] You remember they made the first William Pitt Earl of Chatham, and he went into eclipse in the House of Lords. Some one asked Chesterfield what had become of Pitt. “He has had a fall up-stairs,” was the answer. Governor Andrew or Judge Andrew sounds equally well. But I like the right man in the right place. The chief justiceship belongs to the party of progress. Their Sparta can point to many sons worthy of the place,--Sewall, Hoar, Dana, or we might have offered another laurel for the brow of our great Senator, were it only to show him that the profession he once honored still remembers her truant son. [Great applause.] The outgoing administration, which entailed that office on talents, however respectable, that belong to the party of resistance, placed itself by the side of Arnold selling West Point to the British!