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

[331] them that all their labor had been in vain. Then Mr. J. Murray Howe, without any flimsy veil of parliamentary pretext, a bully girdled by bullies, failing to excite any violent resistance, urged or incited the police to arrest all whom his followers struck, on the ground of removing the cause of the disturbance. And the shameless Mayor closed the scene [hisses],--the plot unmasked by the quiet discipline of the friends of order was disclosed, and the City Government succored its defeated accomplices by clearing the hall in the prostituted names of law and order. [Loud cheers and some hisses.]

I have named only the leaders of this mob, and described the pitiful quality of their followers. You will ask me, How did such a mass influence the Mayor? I am sorry to say, that among that crowd were men influential by wealth and position, men seldom seen in an antislavery meeting, whose presence there at that unusual hour,--ten o'clock in the morning,--sitting in silence, was an encouragement to their personal friends, the mob. You may see, still looking down on Washington Street, the gilded names of Lawrence and Dickinson, and, side by side, the proud motto, “The Union, the Constitution, the Enforcement of the Laws.” [Cheers.] One of those names, which the city has hitherto loved to honor, was present in that crowd, in a class of meetings where he is seldom seen,--never at ten o'clock in the morning,--while his personal friends resisted, with the encouragement of his unusual presence, the enforcement of the most sacred of all laws, that of free speech. Need I explain any otherwise the servility of the Mayor?

Some men say that free speech was really crushed out on that occasion. No. On that same day, that same meeting held a session, addressed by the most hated of its speakers, expressing their opinions on slavery and the scene of the morning. The exact, literal truth is. that