Above party, unless it be the honorable and ancient party of mankind, they embody the temper and drift of the times. How many public men are here to survive in the pillory of his indignant invectives! The history of the last thirty years cannot be accurately written without his facts and anecdotes. There is no great interest of philanthropy in which he has not been, and still is, active. His words are to be taken as those of an earnest mind intent on furthering the ends of justice, interpreted not by their rhetoric, but strict adherence to principle. Certainly the country has at times hung in the balance of his argument; cabinets and councils hesitating to do or undo without some regard to his words, well knowing the better constituency which he better represents and speaks for,—the people, namely, whose breath can unmake as it has made.
An earnest, truthful man, he has not shared with other statesmen of his time in their indifferency nor their despair; and if by some esteemed a demagogue and disorganizer, such is not his estimate of the part taken by him in the great issues of the past, political and social. The friend of progress, he early threw himself into the conflict, addressed himself to the issues as they rose, rose with them and rode the wave bravely; sometimes hastening, oftentimes provoking the crisis. What States would not adventure upon as policy, he espoused as policy and humanity both. Addressing himself from the first to the great middle class, whose principles are less corrupted by party politics, in whom the free destiny of peoples is lodged, he is gathering the elements of power and authority which, becoming formidable in ability if not in numbers, must secure the country's confidence, and in due time have political dictation and rule.
Then, of the new instrumentalities for agitation and reform, the free Platform derives largely its popularity and efficiency from his genius. Consider the freedom of speech it invites and maintains, free as the freest can make it, a stand whereon every one who will gains a hearing; every opinion its widest scope of entertainment,—the widest hospitality consistent with the decorum of debate. Hither comes any one breathing a sentiment of progress, any daring to dissent against dissent, against progress itself. Here the sexes meet on fair terms. Here, as not elsewhere, is intimated, if not spoken fittingly, the popular spirit and tendency. Here come the most effective speakers by preference to address a free constituency, a constituency to be theirs, if not already, their words leaping into type from their lips, to be spread forthwith to the four winds by the reporting press. 'Tis a school of debate, for oratory, for thought, for practice; has the remarkable merit of freshness, originality; questions affecting the public welfare being here anticipated, first deliberated upon by the people themselves; systems of agitation organized and set on foot for creating a wholesome popular sentiment; in short, for giving inspiration, a culture, to the country, which the universities cannot; training the reason and moral sense by direct dealing with principles and persons as occasion requires; a school from whence have graduated not a few of our popular speakers,—the Orator himself, whose speeches furnish passages for collegiate declamation, from which politicians plume their rhetoric to win a borrowed fame. Cato said, "An orator was a good man skilled in the art of speaking."
More than any lecturer, unless it be Emerson, he has made the lecture a New-England, if not an American institution; is always heard with profit and pleasure by the unprejudiced auditor,—any course in the cities and towns being thought incomplete without his. Nor is it easy to estimate the debt of the free States to his speeches before associations, conventions, in pulpits, the humblest places where his words could be secured. He has already taken his place beside Garrison, has linked his name with the Liberator's, to be on men's lips while the word slave has significance.
If there be any one to whom the country is more largely indebted than another for eminent services in his day, it must be Garrison; unless a doubt may arise in the minds of some, if the hero of Harper's Ferry be not entitled to like honors, since to these illustrious men must be attributed the merit of having struck the most effective blows for the overthrow of slavery, the one inaugurating the era of emancipation, and the other consummating it.
"The just man's like a rock, that turns the wroth
Of all the raging waters into a froth."
The agitation and outside pressure which they were chiefly instrumental in furthering to its rightful issues, were the most powerful auxiliaries, if not the power itself, which emancipated the mind of the country from its subserviency to the slave dominion. They were the creators of the sentiment that freed the negro at last from his bonds and cleared the way for a true Republican State. Some power superior to the Constitution was required to revise it, and free the whole people from this Arachne's coil that had bound them so long; was especially needed to extricate the rulers themselves from its meshes, and to rescue the rights thus imperilled by unscrupulous placemen who shrunk from the task. These could not help them, caught in the same snare that bound the nation. "Neither the law, nor the Constitution, nor the whole system of American institutions," they were told, "ever had contemplated a case as likely to arise under our system in which a resort would be necessary to provide outside of the law and Constitution for amending the Constitution." The case arose, nevertheless, and was provided for by these powerful agitators, and by the progress of events. The late civil outbreak compelled the necessary amendments, sweeping the compromises, the slave Congress and territory from the statute books and the country itself.
"Principles like fountains flow round forever,
Being in a state of perpetual agitation."