The lady at first refused, but was persuaded to take it. When she reached home she found there were fifty dollars—all he had received for his lecture at Gloucester.
In 1870 Phillips accepted the nomination for the governorship of Massachusetts from the prohibition and the labor parties, though he said, and undoubtedly with truth, that he had no desire to be governor. He received over twenty thousand votes.
When blamed because he favored General Butler for governor, he replied that he did not know a man among all the candidates whom he would make a saint of. "The difficulty is," said he, with his natural love of humor, "saints do not come very often; and, when they do, it is the hardest thing in the world to get them into politics."
When Andrew Johnson was not impeached, as Phillips hoped he would be, he used to say, "Congress has deposed him without impeachment. 'Friend, I'll not shoot thee,' said the Quaker to the footpad, 'but I'll hold thy head in the water until thee drown thyself.' The Republican party has taken a leaf out of that scrupulous Christian's book."
Phillips was a Protectionist. In early life he was a free-trader, but changed his views. "Under free trade," he said, "our country would be wholly agricultural.... Should we lose our diversified occupations, we would suffer a great loss, though there might be a pecuniary gain.... If all the world were under one law, and every man raised to the level of the Sermon on the Mount, free trade would be so easy and charming! But while nations study only how to cripple their enemies,—that is, their neighbors,—and while each trader strives to cheat his customer, and strangle the firm on the other side of the street, we must not expect the millennium."
He smiled at the "shoals of college-boys, slenderly furnished with Greek and Latin, but steeped in marvellous and delightful ignorance of life and public affairs, filling the country with free-trade din."
Phillips pleaded the cause of the Irish in his wonderful lecture on Daniel O'Connell. He was also the friend and advocate of the Indian.
He opposed capital punishment, because he thought the old Testament law—about which scholars disagree—was no more binding upon us than scores of others given to the Jews about "abstaining from meats offered to idols, and from blood and from things strangled," etc. Once men were hanged in England for stealing a shilling. We are gradually learning that reform is what society needs—not revenge.
Mr. Phillips spoke on finance before the American Social Science Association. His plan was, says Austin: "Take from the national banks all right to issue bills; let the nation itself supply a currency ample for all public needs; reduce the rate of interest."
In the summer of 1880 Mr. Phillips and his wife spent some time at Princeton, Mass. He was then sixty-nine years old. He wrote a friend: "I laze and ride on horseback, exploring the drives.... The rest of the time I sleep. I weigh a hundred and seventy-five pounds, and don't feel as old as I am."