It ought to be remembered that as soon as he had any leisure from his work as an Anti-Slavery agitator, he gave his time and power, in the same open-handed way, to the temperance cause. In all these late years the friends of temperance reform have had no public man more ready to take up their work for them than he.
The country has shown that it can duly honor such an agitator, whose own conscience was always clear, even though no man could agree with him in what he called opinions. The truth is, they were as often impulses as convictions. But in the matter of slavery, of temperance, and of charity, he had settled convictions, and lived on them without flinching. He was utterly without thought of self.
The public has never known nor said enough of Mr. Phillips’s private charities, and I can not wonder at it. It is impossible for any one to speak fitly of them this side of the recording angel. Throughout the world Mr. Phillips had a reputation as helper of the oppressed, and with this reputation, the other, more dangerous to the comfort of its possessor, that he cared nothing for popularity, and that he acted from his own knowledge and will alone, and without regard to the recommendations of anybody. Thus it was natural that every wanderer, every outcast, of every color or nation, when he might find himself in need in Boston went first to Mr. Phillips’s door, and that he should find the door always open to him. He gave lavishly whenever he thought he ought to give, not only of his time but of his money; exactly how much no one but himself ever knew. His house became a sort of bureau of charity, investigation and relief, so that whenever man, woman or child was not known at the overseers of the poor, at the “Provident,” or at the “Associated Charities,” it was the more certain that he was known at Mr. Phillips’s. He gave his alms literally to all sorts and conditions of men.
That would be a very queer world—and it would be hard to say how it would fare—which should be made up of Wendell Phillipses. But this may be fairly said—that one such man in a community like that of New England, renders essential service. In his case, while there were thousands who hated him, other thousands loved him—and the thousands who loved, lived much nearer to him, and knew him a thousand times better than the thousands who hated.
HESITATION AND ERRORS IN SPEECH.
By J. MORTIMER-GRANVILLE.