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

[327] store-houses; gather these treasures of science into the lap of the State, and see if we cannot create for our women a nobler career, and call into being a society which will refine life, and win men from cares that eat out everything lofty, and sensual pleasures that make them half brutes.

All these things work for us. They would make government unnecessary, so far as it is coercion. I look upon these things as I do upon the windmills one sees all over the provinces of Holland. They have shut out the ocean with dykes; past ages built up the colossal structures which save Holland from the wave. So we have built up laws, churches, universities, to keep out from our garnered Commonwealth the flood of ignorance and passion and misrule. But in morals as in Nature, the water which we press back upon the flood oozes daily through the mass; and the cunning Hollander for centuries, remembering this law, has placed his picturesque and wide-spread sails to catch every breeze that sweeps through the country, and as fast as Nature lets the ocean ooze through his defences, the tireless windmills lift it and pour it back into the depths of the sea, and every breeze that hurries across the province at night tells the Dutchman, as he listens, that his home is safer for its passage. So, while you wake or sleep, these stores and associations shall do the work for you which the winds do for Holland. As the floods of vice ooze back through your defences, they shall relieve you from the continual watching, and educate the people in spite of themselves, winning them to think, pointing them through Nature to her God, fortifying virtue by habits that render low stimulus needless, and developing the whole man.

I think we owe all this to posterity. The generations that preceded us built ships, roads, cities, invented arts,