Frank Preston Stearns, Cambridge Sketches

[50] men who neglected their political duties. “Why are you discouraged?” he would ask. “Times will change. Remember the Free-soil movement!” He attended caucuses as regularly as the meetings of the faculty, and served as a delegate to a number of conventions. More than once he aroused the good citizens of Cambridge to the danger of insidious plots by low demagogues against the public welfare. The poet Longfellow took notice of this and spoke of him as an invaluable man.

On another occasion Professor Child was discoursing to his class on oratory and mentioned the fact that Webster and Choate both came from Dartmouth; that Wendell Phillips graduated at Harvard, but the university had not seen much of him since. At the mention of Wendell Phillips some of the boys from proslavery families began to sneer. Professor Child raised himself up and said determinedly, “Wendell Phillips is as good an orator as either of them!” He was chagrined, however, at Phillips's later public course,--his support of Socialism and General Butler. Neither did he like Phillips's Phi Beta Kappa oration, in which he advocated the dagger and dynamite for tyrants. “A tyrant,” said Professor Child, “is what anyone chooses to imagine. My hired man may consider me a tyrant and blow me up according to Mr. Phillips' s principle.” The