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

[361] made its revolutionary purpose so definite that despotism feared its very language. I only wished that injustice and despotism everywhere might one day have as good cause to hate and to fear everything American.

At last that disgraceful seal of slave complicity is broken. Let us inaugurate a new departure, recognize that we are afloat on the current of Niagara, eternal vigilance the condition of our safety, that we are irrevocably pledged to the world not to go back to bolts and bars,--could not if we would, and would not if we could. Never again be ours the fastidious scholarship that shrinks from rude contact with the masses. Very pleasant it is to sit high up in the world's theatre and criticise the ungraceful struggles of the gladiators, shrug one's shoulders at the actors' harsh cries, and let every one know that but for “this villanous saltpetre you would yourself have been a soldier.” But Bacon says, “In the theatre of man's life, God and his angels only should be lookers-on.” “Sin is not taken out of man as Eve was out of Adam, by putting him to sleep.” “Very beautiful,” says Richter, “is the eagle when he floats with outstretched wings aloft in the clear blue; but sublime when he plunges down through the tempest to his eyry on the cliff, where his unfledged young ones dwell and are starving.” Accept proudly the analysis of Fisher Ames: “A monarchy is a man-of-war, stanch, iron-ribbed, and resistless when under full sail; yet a single hidden rock sends her to the bottom. Our republic is a raft hard to steer, and your feet always wet; but nothing can sink her.” If the Alps, piled in cold and silence, be the emblem of despotism, we joyfully take the ever-restless ocean for ours,--only pure because never still.

Journalism must have more self-respect. Now it praises good and bad men so indiscriminately that a