to you that I come here this morning to retract those opinions. No, not one of them." Those were days of flame and fire, and I said to Phillips that they would never let him get farther. "Well," he answered, "if I cannot say that I will say nothing." And he read on. "I need them all,- every word I have spoken this winter, every act of twenty-five years of my life, to make the welcome I give this War hearty and hot." The result justified his gallantry. The low murmurs which the opening sentence provoked were swept away in the storm of passionate cheers which followed.

All this dwelling upon the moral attributes of the orator may seem out of place in a brief criticism; but it is inevitable. Take away the moral impulse and there would have been no orator, no oratory, no thirty years of unmatched eloquence, no such rhetorical lesson as the speeches of Phillips now give. There is, unhappily, no adequate record of them; as there is none of the speeches of any orator of the first order, except where they were written out like those of the great Greek, or written and rewritten like his Roman rival's or like Burke's, or unless, like those of the one great English orator of this generation, Bright, they were fully reported at the time. Phillips was never thought worth reporting till late in life. He was of the minority; and then as now, the tyranny of the majority in this country was oppressive and relentless. They meant to keep him in obscurity: it was the sun of his genius which burst through the mists and darkness which enveloped him. Traditions still fresh tell you of the beauty of Phillips's presence on the platform, of his incomparable charm of manner and voice, of his persuasiveness, and much else. But oratory, save under such conditions as I mentioned above, is evanescent. That of Phillips did its work: it is the eulogy he would value most. There was in him the poet. He had in abounding measure the sympathies without which no oratory, be its other qualities what they may, carries an audience captive. He put himself instantly on easy terms with those before him. He could be colloquial and familiar, he delighted in repartee,-in which he never found his equal,- the next moment he was among the clouds, and on the just and unjust alike descended a rain of eloquence, beneath which sprang forth those seeds of virtue and moral faith and religious hatred of wrong which presently covered the land.

There was much of the Greek in him: the sense of ordered beauty and of art. He had culture; the fire of true patriotism; serenity of mind. Not a speech in which those high qualities are not visible. They were still more evident as you heard him; and still more, perhaps, the symmetrical quality of mind and speech which is almost the rarest in modern oratory or modern life. He had indomitable good-nature on the platform. The hard things he said about men had no root in his heart; they were meant to fasten attention not on the

sin only, which is abstract, but on the sinner. Intellectually a Greek, his moral nature was Hebraic, and the language of the Old Testament is inwrought in his oratory. But there was a smile on his face while the lightnings flashed. The authority with which he spoke was due largely to this coolness; but it is idle to ascribe it to any one trait, and to seek for the sources of it in mere rhetoric or mere culture. The true source of it was the whole man.

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE.-Wendell Phillips was born in Boston, Massachusetts, November 29th, 1811; a son of the city's first mayor, and allied to the State's best blood and brains. He graduated at Harvard College in 1831, and from its Law School in 1833. A year later he was admitted to the bar. His career as a leader of men and a public orator, however, began early, and almost uninterruptedly engaged him until the close of his life. His denunciatory speech on the murder of Lovejoy, in 1837, may be reckoned the opening of his platform. career. His "great speeches" followed each other rapidly. He threw himself fervently into the Abolition movement, and succeeded William Lloyd Garrison as president of the Anti-Slavery Society, in 1865. His continuous tours as a lecturer occupied all his latter years. He died February 2d, 1884.

The following selection is from one of the most famous of his general lectures. Only one other was equally identified with his name in popular regard,- that on 'Lost Arts'; a brilliant mosaic of apocrypha from all ages, so plausibly stated that it was hard to resist conviction of their truth while listening to his easy, graceful, conversational periods, spoken as though he had just remembered some interesting facts and wished to share the pleasure with a group of friends.

THE HERO OF HAYTI

From Toussaint l'Ouverture,' a lecture delivered in 1861. Copyright 1863, by Wendell Phillips

HIS is what Edward Everett calls the Insurrection of St. Do

Tmingo. It bore for its motto on one side of its banner,

"Long live the King"; and on the other, "We claim the Old Laws." Singular mottoes for a rebellion. In fact, it was the posse comitatus; it was the only French army on the island; it

was the only force that had a right to bear arms: and what it undertook it achieved. It put Blanchelande in his seat; it put the island beneath his rule. When it was done, the blacks said to the governor they had created, "Now grant us one day in seven; give us one day's labor; we will buy another, and with the two buy a third," the favorite method of emancipation at that time. Like the Blanchelande of five years before, he refused. He said, "Disarm! Disperse!" and the blacks answered, «< The right hand that has saved you, the right hand that has saved the island for the Bourbons, may perchance clutch some of our own rights;" and they stood still. This is the first insurrection, if any such there were in St. Domingo,- the first determined purpose on the part of the negro, having saved the government, to save himself.

At such a moment Toussaint l'Ouverture appeared.

He had been born a slave on a plantation in the north of the island, an unmixed negro,- his father stolen from Africa. If anything, therefore, that I say of him to-night moves your admiration, remember, the black race claims it all,- we have no part nor lot in it. He was fifty years old at this time. An old negro had taught him to read. His favorite books were Epictetus, Raynal, military memoirs, Plutarch. In the woods he learned some of the qualities of herbs; and was village doctor. On the estate, the highest place he ever reached was that of coachman. At fifty he joined the army as physician. Before he went, he placed his master and mistress on shipboard, freighted the vessel with a cargo of sugar and coffee, and sent them to Baltimore; and never afterward did he forget to send them, year by year, ample means of support. And I might add, that of all the leading negro generals, each one saved the man under whose roof he was born, and protected the family.

Let me add another thing. If I stood here to-night to tell the story of Napoleon, I should take it from the lips of Frenchmen, who find no language rich enough to paint the great captain of the nineteenth century. Were I here to tell you the story of Washington, I should take it from your hearts,-you, who think no marble white enough on which to carve the name of the Father of his Country. I am about to tell you the story of a negro who has left hardly one written line. I am to glean it from the reluctant testimony of Britons, Frenchmen, Spaniards,

men who despised him as a negro and a slave, and hated him because he had beaten them in many a battle. All the materials for his biography are from the lips of his enemies.

The second story told of him is this: About the time he reached the camp, the army had been subjected to two insults. First their commissioners, summoned to meet the French Committee, were ignominiously and insultingly dismissed; and when afterward François, their general, was summoned to a second conference, and went to it on horseback, accompanied by two officers, a young lieutenant, who had known him as a slave, angered at seeing him in the uniform of an officer, raised his riding-whip and struck him over the shoulders. If he had been the savage which the negro is painted to us, he had only to breathe the insult to his twenty-five thousand soldiers, and they would have trodden out the Frenchmen in blood. But the indignant chief rode back in silence to his tent, and it was twentyfour hours before his troops heard of this insult to their general. Then the word went forth, "Death to every white man!" They had fifteen hundred prisoners. Ranged in front of the camp, they were about to be shot. Toussaint, who had a vein of religious fanaticism, like most great leaders,-like Mohammed, like Napoleon, like Cromwell, like John Brown, he could preach as well as fight,-mounting a hillock, and getting the ear of the crowd, exclaimed:-"Brothers, this blood will not wipe out the insult to our chief; only the blood in yonder French camp can wipe it out. To shed that is courage; to shed this is cowardice and cruelty besides; "-and he saved fifteen hundred lives.

This

I cannot stop to give in detail every one of his efforts. was in 1793. Leap with me over seven years; come to 1800: what has he achieved? He has driven the Spaniard back into his own cities, conquered him there, and put the French banner over every Spanish town; and for the first time, and almost the last, the island obeys one law. He has put the mulatto under his feet. He has attacked Maitland, defeated him in pitched battles, and permitted him to retreat to Jamaica; and when the French army rose upon Laveaux, their general, and put him in chains, Toussaint defeated them, took Laveaux out of prison, and put him at the head of his own troops. The grateful French in return named him general-in-chief. "Cet homme fait

l'ouverture partout," said one (This man makes an opening everywhere); hence his soldiers named him "L'Ouverture," the opening.

This was the work of seven years. Let us pause a moment, and find something to measure him by. You remember Macaulay says, comparing Cromwell with Napoleon, that Cromwell showed the greater military genius, if we consider that he never saw an army till he was forty; while Napoleon was educated from a boy in the best military schools in Europe. Cromwell manufactured his own army; Napoleon at the age of twentyseven was placed at the head of the best troops Europe ever saw. They were both successful; but, says Macaulay, with such disadvantages the Englishman showed the greater genius. Whether you allow the inference or not, you will at least grant that it is a fair mode of measurement. Apply it to Toussaint. Cromwell never saw an army till he was forty: this man never saw a soldier till he was fifty. Cromwell manufactured his own army -out of what? Englishmen, the best blood in Europe; out of the middle class of Englishmen, the best blood of the island. And with it he conquered — what? Englishmen, their equals. This man manufactured his army-out of what? Out of what you call the despicable race of negroes, debased, demoralized by two hundred years of slavery, one hundred thousand of them. imported into the island within four years, unable to speak a dialect intelligible even to each other. Yet out of this mixed, and as you say, despicable mass, he forged a thunderbolt and hurled it at - what? At the proudest blood in Europe, the Spaniard, and sent him home conquered; at the most warlike blood in Europe, the French, and put them under his feet; at the pluckiest blood in Europe, the English, and they skulked home to Jamaica. Now if Cromwell was a general, at least this man was a soldier. I know it was a small territory; it was not as large as the continent: but it was as large as that Attica, which with Athens for a capital has filled the earth with its fame for two thousand years. We measure genius by quality, not by quantity.

Further, Cromwell was only a soldier; his fame stops there. Not one line in the statute-book of Britain can be traced to Cromwell; not one step in the social life of England finds its motive power in his brain. The State he founded went down with him to his grave. But this man no sooner put his hand