slaves. It is sometimes said that oratory is
dying out in our Congress. But Congress is now a board of trade,
discussing duties, protective tariffs on wool, cotton, and hides.
Beecher and Phillips had a great theme--liberty, the emancipation of
millions of slaves. The modern orator in the Senate discusses the
mathematics of woolen goods. It is hard to be eloquent over one salt
barrel and two piles of cowhides. A sermon or a lecture on topics that
fifty years ago would have crowded the greatest room and the street
outside would not to-day draw a corporal's guard.

But in those heroic days, there was a great opportunity, and the
opportunity was matched by the man. Phillips was handsome as an Apollo.
His voice was sweet as a harp. No man ever studied the art of public
speech more scientifically. He played upon an audience as a skillful
musician upon the banks of keys in an organ. A Southern slaveholder
heard him in the Academy of Music, hating him, but paying him this
tribute, "That man is an infernal machine set to music." His method was
practically the memoriter method. A gentleman, who heard him give his
"Daniel O'Connell" four times in succession, found that the lecture was
repeated without the slightest variation whatsoever, in ideas,
sentences, inflection of the voice, or even gesture. Phillips prepared
his lectures with the greatest care, and then repeated them hundreds of
times. From the moment when he came upon the platform his presence
filled the eye and satisfied it. His very ease and poise begat
confidence and delight. He carved each sentence out of solid sunshine.
He stood quietly, made few gestures, adopted the conversational tone and
took the audience into his confidence.

Some of his finest effects were produced by the injection of a
parenthesis. Once in an evening sermon in Plymouth Church, when Beecher
was urging the reelection of Lincoln and defending the Republican party,
a disputatious individual called out from the congregation, "What about
Wendell Phillips?" To which Mr. Beecher made the instant answer,
"Wendell Phillips is not a Republican. Wendell Phillips is a radical and
an independent. What this country needs is not a man of words but a man
of deeds." A few nights later Wendell Phillips was lecturing in the
Brooklyn Academy of Music before the St. Patrick's Society, and made his
reply in the form of a parenthesis, barbing his shaft with an exquisite
inflection of his voice. "Mr. Beecher said l