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

[71] at the present moment,--it is that millions of it wear the chain; there is nothing for the rest of the race decent to do but to devote themselves to the breaking of that chain. [Applause.] All literature, all wealth, all patriotism, all religion, should gravitate toward emancipation. I value the triumphs of the literary genius of Dumas solely as an argument thrown into the scale of the great balance, whether the colored man is worthy of liberty. Genius is worth nothing else now with the colored man, except as helping that argument. I would have you, as your friend Dr. Rock suggested, thrifty, eloquent, industrious, successful, rich, able, only as an argument that the colored race has a right to a place side by side and equal with the white. I wish I could impress this truth on every colored man. His race to-day is on trial. The world says it merits only chains. The best thing he can do with his life, with his genius, with his wealth, with his character, is to throw them into the scale of the argument, and make pro-slavery prejudice kick the beam.

I want to say another thing. I do not believe in the argument which my learned and eloquent friend Theodore Parker has stated in regard even to the courage of colored blood. It is a hazardous thing to dare to differ with so profound a scholar, with so careful a thinker as Theodore Parker; but I cannot accept his argument and for this reason,--he says the Caucasian race, each man of it, would kill twenty men and enslave twenty more rather than be a slave ;. and thence he deduces that the colored race, which suffers slavery here, is not emphatically distinguished for courage. I take issue on that statement. There is no race in the world that has not been enslaved at one period. This very Saxon blood we boast, was enslaved for five centuries in Europe. We were slaves,--we white