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

This, then, is my purpose,--to look at Kossuth as the slave would look at him. Let me preface what I have to say with a single remark about America. You will recollect the old story of the African chief, seated naked under his palm-tree to receive the captain of an English frigate, and the first question he asked was, “What do they say of me in England?” We laugh at this vanity of a naked savage, canopied by a palm-tree, on an unknown river somewhere in the desert of a barbarous continent; but the same spirit pervades our twenty millions of Americans. The heart of every man is constantly asking the question, “What do they say of us in England?” Europe is the great tribunal for whose decision American sensitiveness always stands waiting in awe. We declared our independence, in 1876, of the British Crown, but we are vassals, to-day, of British opinion. So far as concerns American literature or American thought, the sceptre has never departed from Judah; it dwells yet with the elder branch on the other side of the water. The American still looks with too servile admiration to the institutions which his fathers reluctantly quitted, and which he still regards with overmuch fondness. Our literature is but a pale reflection of the English mind; and one reason why we have never become more thoroughly democratic is because, while our institutions have been so in form, the whole literature upon which we lived was impregnated with English ideas, and every student and every thinker breathed the atmosphere of London. London is yet the great fount of ideas for all the Saxon race. Not until the principles of democracy shall enter Temple Bar, will the Saxon race be fully democratic, whether planted on the steppes of the Cordilleras or on the shores of the