Wendell Phillips, Theodore C. Pease, Speeches, Lectures and Letters of Wendell Phillips: Volume 2

[340] cries of crushed and starving labor. When common-sense and the common people have stereotyped a principle into a statute, then book-men come to explain how it was discovered and on what ground it rests. The world makes history, and scholars write it,--one half truly, and the other half as their prejudices blur and distort it.

New England learned more of the principles of toleration from a lyceum committee doubting the dicta of editors and bishops when they forbade it to put Theodore Parker on its platform; more from a debate whether the Antislavery cause should be so far countenanced as to invite one of its advocates to lecture; from Sumner and Emerson, George William Curtis, and Edwin Whipple, refusing to speak unless a negro could buy his way into their halls as freely as any other,--New England has learned more from these lessons than she has or could have done from all the treatises on free printing from Milton and Roger Williams through Locke down to Stuart Mill.

Selden, the profoundest scholar of his day, affirmed, “No man is wiser for his learning;” and that was only an echo of the Saxon proverb, “No fool is a perfect fool until he learns Latin.” Bancroft says of our fathers, that “the wildest theories of the human reason were reduced to practice by a community so humble that no statesman condescended to notice it, and a legislation without precedent was produced off-hand by the instincts of the people.” And Wordsworth testifies, that, while German schools might well blush for their subserviency,--

A few strong instincts and a few plain rules,
Among the herdsmen of the Alps, have wrought
More for mankind at this unhappy day
Than all the pride of intellect and thought.