Wendell Phillips, Theodore C. Pease, Speeches, Lectures and Letters of Wendell Phillips: Volume 1

[45] equality; that, for a moment, a party may stand against the age, but in the end it goes by the board; that the man who launches a sound argument, who sets on two feet a startling fact, and bids it travel from Maine to Georgia, is just as certain that in the end he will change the government, as if, to destroy the Capitol, he had placed gunpowder under the Senate-chamber. Natural philosophers tell us, that, if you will only multiply the simplest force into enough time, it will equal the greatest. So it is with the slow intellectual movement of the masses. It can scarcely be seen, but it is a constant movement: it is the shadow on the dial; never still, though never seen to move; it is the tide, it is the ocean, gaining on the proudest and strongest bulwarks that human art or strength can build. It may be defied for a moment, but in the end Nature always triumphs. So the race, if it cannot drag a Webster along with it, leaves him behind and forgets him. [Loud cheers.] The race is rich enough to afford to do without the greatest intellects God ever let the Devil buy. Stranded along the past, there are a great many dried mummies of dead intellects, which the race found too heavy to drag forward.

I hail the almighty power of the tongue. I swear allegiance to the omnipotence of the press. The people never err. “Vox populi, Vox Dei,”-the voice of the people is the voice of God. I do not mean this of any single verdict which the people of to-day may record. In time, the selfishness of one class neutralizes the selfishness of another. The interests of one age clash against the interests of another; but in the great result the race always means right. The people always mean right, and in the end they will have the right. I believe in the twenty millions--not the twenty millions that live now, necessarily — to arrange this question of slavery, which priests and politicians have sought to keep out of sight