e,
and do, and suffer for them; but he was never of them, nor equaled
himself to them. He was always above them, and his gifts of love were
always the gifts of a prince to his subjects. All his life long he
resented every attack on his person and on his honor, as a noble
aristocrat would. When they poured the filth of their imaginations upon
him, he cared no more for it than the eagle cares what the fly is
thinking about him away down under the cloud. All the miserable
traffickers, and all the scribblers, and all the aristocratic boobies of
Boston were no more to him than mosquitoes are to the behemoth or to the
lion. He was aristocratic in his pride, and lived higher than most men
lived. He was called of God as much as ever Moses and the prophets were;
not exactly for the same great end, but in consonance with those great
ends. You remember, my brother, when Lovejoy was infamously slaughtered
by a mob in Alton?--blood that has been the seed of liberty all over
this land! I remember it. At this time it was that Channing lifted up
his voice and declared that the moral sentiment of Boston ought to be
uttered in rebuke of that infamy and cruelty, and asking for Faneuil
Hall in which to call a public meeting. This was indignantly refused by
the Common Council of Boston. Being a man of wide influence, he gathered
around about himself enough venerable and influential old citizens of
Boston to make a denial of their united request a perilous thing; and
Faneuil Hall was granted to call a public meeting to express itself on
this subject of the murder of Lovejoy. The meeting was made up largely
of rowdies. They meant to overawe and put down all other expressions of
opinion except those that then rioted with the riotous. United States
District-attorney Austin (when Wendell Phillips's name is written in
letters of light on one side of the monument, down low on the other
side, and spattered with dirt, let the name of Austin also be written)
made a truculent speech, and justified the mob, and ran the whole career
of the sewer of those days and justified non-interference with slavery.
Wendell Phillips, just come to town as a young lawyer, without at
present any practice, practically unknown, except to his own family,
fired with the infamy, and, feeling called of God in his soul, went upon
the platform. His first utterances brought down the hisses of the mob.
He was not a man very easily subdued by any mob. They listened as he
kindled a