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

[346] uphold trade and secure growth. Without the Union, Mr. Seward tells us we can neither be safe, rich, strong, nor happy. We used to think justice was before thrift, and nobleness better than happiness. I place no great reliance on that prudent patriotism which is the child of interest. The Tribune, unusually frank, pre-eminently honorable and lofty as has been its tone of late, still says, “Be it the business of the people everywhere to forget the negro, and remember only the country.” [Applause.]

After drifting, a dreary night of thirty years, before the hurricane, our ship of state is going to pieces on the lee shore of slavery. Every one confesses that the poison of our body politic is slavery. European critics, in view of it, have pronounced the existence of the Union hitherto a “fortunate accident.” Orators floated into fame on one inspired phrase, “irrepressible conflict.” Jefferson died foreseeing that this was the rock on which we should split. Even Mr. Webster, speaking with bated breath, in the cold chill of 1850, still dared to be a statesman, and offered to meet the South on this question, suggesting a broad plan for the cure of our dread disease. But now, with the Union dropping asunder, with every brain and tongue active, we have yet to hear the first statesman-word, the first proposal to consider the fountain and origin of all our ills. We look in vain through Mr. Seward's speech for one hint or suggestion as to any method of dealing with our terrible hurt. Indeed, one of his terrors of disunion is, that it will give room for “an European, an uncompromising hostility to slavery.” Such an hostility — the irrepressible conflict of right and wrong — William H. Seward, in 1861, pronounces “fearful!” To describe the great conflict of the age, the first of American statesmen, in the year of Garibaldi and Italy, can find no epithet but “fearful.”