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

[316] among the collected intellectual fruits of their fellows, without tasting something of education. If I were, therefore, speaking simply as a Massachusetts citizen, with my future interest in the hands of a democratic legislature, chosen from among the people, I should claim of the wealth of the State, of the wealth of the wealthiest, that it was all mortgaged, not for ordinary schools merely, not for book culture, not even for the costly apparatus of university life, but that, in the crowded thoroughfares of cities, there should be thrown open to the public, in every large crowd of population, the means of studying the great sciences of the day.

If I asked it for nothing else, I would ask it as wise policy for the future. I believe in it as education. As simple, individual education, I believe in it — I believe in it as thoroughly, and for the same ends, as those Englishmen to whom I have referred. I welcome it as such. I know its influence. I believe that the dissipated young man of Boston who goes to Paris to spend his three years, has fifty chances out of a hundred to come back a better moral man from the fact that his nature derives the needed stimulus from causes which call out his mind and better feelings,--for we can, none of us, get along without some stimulus. In our country, there are only three sources of stimulus, as a general thing: One is the keen zest of money-making; the other is the intense excitement of politics; and if a man cannot throw himself into either of these he takes to drinking. [Laughter and applause.] It is no marvel that there is so much dissipation among us; for every human being must have his pleasure, must have his excitement. One man snatches it in ambition, another man hives it in close pursuit of wealth, and in pecuniary success.

There was a time when it seemed almost providential