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

---

[154] no more arming of different bands; no cannon loaded to the lips. To-day the people have chosen a wiser method,--they have got the ballot in their light hands, and they say, “We come to take possession of the governments of the earth.” In the interests of peace, I welcome this movement,--the peaceable marshalling of all voters toward remodelling the industrial and political civilization of the day. I have not a word to utter,--far be it from me!--against the grandest declaration of popular indignation which Paris wrote on the pages of history in fire and blood. I honor Paris as the vanguard of the Internationals of the world. When kings wake at night, startled and aghast, they do not dream of Germany and its orderly array or forces. Aristocracy wakes up aghast at the memory of France; and when I want to find the vanguard of the people, I look to the uneasy dreams of an aristocracy, and find what they dread most. And today the conspiracy of emperors is to put down — what? Not the Czar, not the Emperor William, not the armies of United Germany; but, when the emperors come together in the centre of Europe, what plot do they lay To annihilate the Internationals, and France is the soul of the Internationals. I, for one, honor Paris; but in the name of Heaven, and with the ballot in our right hands, we shall not need to write our record in fire and blood; we write it in the orderly majorities at the ballot-box.

If any man asks me, therefore, what value I place first upon this movement, I should say it was the movement of humanity to protect itself; and secondly, it is the insurance of peace; and thirdly, it is a guaranty against the destruction of capital. We all know that there is no war between labor and capital; that they are partners, not enemies, and their true interests on any just basis are identical. And this movement of ballot-bearing millions is to avoid the unnecessary waste of capital.

Well, gentlemen, I say so much to justify myself in styling this the grandest and most comprehensive movement of the age.

You do not kill a hundred millions of corporate capital, you do not destroy the virus of incorporate wealth by any one election. The capitalists of Massachusetts are neither fools nor cowards; and you will have to whip them three times, and bury them under a monument weightier than Bunker Hill, before they will believe they are whipped. Now, gentlemen, the inference from that statement is this: The first duty resting on this convention, which rises