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

[330] of the motion to adjourn, that he must not do so until he had arranged for the payment for the hall, this representative of State Street defied Mr. Hayes to compel him to pay for the hall he had used. I blush, even for State Street, under such a fact. And the gallant men who followed him-O shame even to Boston dandies!-were heard encouraging each other with cries of “The police are with us,--the other side pay for them, and we use them!”

Some men assert that Mr. Fay really came to that hall to put down free speech by violence. As it was said that no man was ever so wise as Lord Thurlow looked, so these citizens think no honest man was ever so ignorant as Mr. Fay appeared. I am inclined to believe that he came there designing to crush that Convention in a parliamentary way, but did not know how to do it. Like the captain of the Maine schooner caught in our harbor narrows [here a youth in the gallery raised the mob cry, “All up,” which failed, however, to produce any sensation], who, when some one asked, “Who captains this schooner?” called back, “I undertook to captain her, but find it rather too much for me” ;--so Mr. Fay undertook to captain a parliamentary mob, but found it rather too much for him. Being fully determined, however, to crush the Convention, and finding the quiet and trained friends of it able to outwit and out-general him, he took refuge in violence. He challenged his opponent to a duel, then knocked him over the head with the but of his pistol while his back was turned. Lord George Bentinck leaped from the sporting field and the race-course to the leadership of the House of Commons. Perhaps Mr. Fay thought he could do as much.

After the kid-gloved mobocrat had left the hall, Mr. Sanborn, quietly requesting the real friends of order to remain seated while the mob followed its leader, showed