In November, 1910, there was held in the city of Chicago an anniversary celebration of the life and work of Theodore Parker, a New England Congregational clergyman who lived from 1810 to 1860. When professional philosophers, reformers, and preachers were discussing, in an academic fashion, the question of human freedom, while under our banner of professed "human rights for all," the shackles were on the hands of four millions of slaves, while professional statesmen were temporizing with this iniquitous system and proposing compromises, all of which affected slave owners, and none of them made the slave free, Theodore Parker, in season and out of season at times appropriate and inappropriate, was a flaming firebrand of passionate utterance against the hideous hypocrisy of our national pretense while the rattle of these shackles was in our ears. It was nothing to him that the solid South was against him; it was of no weight to him that many of the "respectable moneyed men" of New England were engaged in the slave trade, and that "practical men of affairs" counseled moderation, toleration, and caution in dealing with so "delicate" a subject. He saw only the horrible facts of human slavery, and that this slavery existed in a land on whose national banner were inscribed the words: "We believe it to be a self-evident truth that all men are created free and equal," and the only delicacy he felt was that the national conscience should be aroused to its hypocrisy, self-deceit, inconsistency, and dishonor, and that the slave-holding and slave-trading business should cease in this "land of the free and home of the brave." We, to whom the Emancipation Proclamation has been familiar ever since its promulgation, cannot conceive the terrible stir, the bitter antagonism, the fierce hostility Parker's clear and ringing words caused at the time of their utterance. In vain his fellow-preachers begged him to be more cautious, to adopt a more conciliatory tone. Like Campanello, who took a bell for his crest, and for his motto the words, "I will not keep silent," he quietly but firmly, calmly but resolutely, refused, and rang out all the louder and more insistently his call to the drugged conscience, sleeping honor, and deadened humanities of his fellow citizens. It was he who inspired in Lincoln that memorable phrase made forever world-famed by his glorious Gettysburg speech: "Government of the people, by the people, for the people." Lincoln spoke November 19, 1863. Parker had written in November, 1846, these words:
Let the world have peace for five hundred years, the aristocracy of blood will have gone, the aristocracy of gold will have come and gone, that of talent will also have come and gone, and the aristocracy of goodness, which is the democracy of man, the government of all, for all, by all, will be the power that is. Democracy is direct self-government over all the people, by all the people, for all the people.
By way of parenthesis, it is interesting here to add that in The Christian (a London, England, weekly paper), for September 17, 1910, there was a letter giving an even earlier use of the phrase, as follows:
Sir: In your report of Principal Carpenter's striking speech at Budapest, you cite his reference to the well-known fact that "It was from Parker that Abraham Lincoln borrowed his famous phrase, 'Government of the people, for the people and by the people.'" But the further fact should be remembered that Parker himself borrowed it—doubtless through his perusal of the current Monthly Repository—from Rev. Robert Aspland, our once-famous Hackney minister. It occurs in Mr. Aspland's speech at the great Whig banquet of 1828, which celebrated the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts, and at which, amongst many distinguished speakers, Mr. Aspland, by common consent, bore away the palm of eloquence.—An Ex-M. P.
These facts in the history of a great phrase I am glad to present, but the most important fact is not the name of the originator, but the names of the men who made the phrase live in the hearts of their fellows as biting, stinging, awakening truths. Parker was one of these. Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips, John G. Whittier, Lowell, John Brown, Lovejoy, Lincoln, were others. And you and I, friendly reader, are to-day basking in the fuller and larger sunlight of freedom let into the house of our common humanity by the fearless, uncompromising, daring courage of these men.
Let us not be laggards in the army of human progress; nor content even to be abreast with the times. Let us be athirst for deeper waters, clearer streams. Let us get nearer the mountain top than either of these two crowds. Let us drink of the fountain spring itself and know nothing else but the fundamental principles of human relationship, and, drinking of them to the full, go forth and radiate them in their original purity, sweetness, and power, diluted only by our imperfect human expression. Let us, in this and all similar matters, make the words of Browning ours, that we may ringingly declare to the world as well as quietly radiate them:
What had I on Earth to do
With the slothful, with the mawkish, the unmanly?
Like the aimless, helpless, hopeless, did I drivel—Being—who?
One who never turned his back but marched breast forward,