asks for powder, but also a spark. Falling on ice, a
spark is impotent, falling on powder, an explosion is inevitable.
Wendell Phillips had already been aroused to sympathy with Garrison and
hatred of slavery, and news of the murder of Lovejoy fell upon his heart
like a spark on a powder magazine. When Boston heard that Lovejoy had
been shot by the mob in Alton, Illinois, while defending his
printing-press, the leading men of Boston came together in Faneuil Hall.
William Ellery Channing made the opening address, and asked that the
meeting go on record through an indignant protest against this assault
upon the rights of free citizens. James T. Austin, attorney-general of
the commonwealth, replied in a bitter and insulting reference to
Channing, asserting that a clergyman with a gun in his hand, or mingling
in the debate of a popular assembly in Faneuil Hall, was marvellously
out of place. Austin compared the slaves of the South to a menagerie of
wild beasts, and asserted that Lovejoy in defending them was
presumptuous, and died as a fool dieth. He added that the rioters in
Alton killed Lovejoy and flung his press into the river in the spirit of
the Boston mob that boarded the British ships in 1773, and threw the
tea overboard on the night of the "Boston Tea Party."

That was a great moment in the history not only of liberty, but also in
that of eloquence. Wendell Phillips, then but six years out of Harvard
College, rose to reply. "A comparison has been drawn between the events
of the Revolution and the tragedy at Alton. We have heard it asserted
here in Faneuil Hall that Great Britain had a right to tax the colonies.
And we have heard the mob at Alton, drunken murderers of Lovejoy,
compared to those patriot fathers who threw the tea overboard! Fellow
citizens, is this Faneuil Hall doctrine? The mob at Alton were met to
wrest from a citizen his just rights,--met to resist the laws. Lovejoy
had stationed himself within constitutional bulwarks. He was not only
defending the freedom of the press, but he was under his own roof, in
arms with the sanction of the civil authority. The men who assailed him
went against and over the laws. The mob, as the gentleman terms it (mob,
forsooth!--certainly we sons of the tea-spillers are a marvellously
patient generation!), the 'orderly mob' which assembled in the Old South
to destroy the tea were met to resist, not the laws, but illegal
exactions. Shame on the American who calls the tea t