out of place. Austin compared the slaves of the South to a menagerie of
wild beasts, and asserted that Lovejoy in defending them was
presumptuous, and died as a fool dieth. He added that the rioters in
Alton killed Lovejoy and flung his press into the river in the spirit of
the Boston mob that boarded the British ships in 1773, and threw the
tea overboard on the night of the "Boston Tea Party."

That was a great moment in the history not only of liberty, but also in
that of eloquence. Wendell Phillips, then but six years out of Harvard
College, rose to reply. "A comparison has been drawn between the events
of the Revolution and the tragedy at Alton. We have heard it asserted
here in Faneuil Hall that Great Britain had a right to tax the colonies.
And we have heard the mob at Alton, drunken murderers of Lovejoy,
compared to those patriot fathers who threw the tea overboard! Fellow
citizens, is this Faneuil Hall doctrine? The mob at Alton were met to
wrest from a citizen his just rights,--met to resist the laws. Lovejoy
had stationed himself within constitutional bulwarks. He was not only
defending the freedom of the press, but he was under his own roof, in
arms with the sanction of the civil authority. The men who assailed him
went against and over the laws. The mob, as the gentleman terms it (mob,
forsooth!--certainly we sons of the tea-spillers are a marvellously
patient generation!), the 'orderly mob' which assembled in the Old South
to destroy the tea were met to resist, not the laws, but illegal
exactions. Shame on the American who calls the tea tax and Stamp Act
laws! Our fathers resisted, not the king's prerogative, but the king's
usurpation. To find any other account you must read our revolutionary
history upside down. To draw the conduct of our ancestors into a
precedent for mobs is an insult to their memory. They were the people
rising to sustain the laws and constitution of the province. The rioters
of our day go for their own wills, right or wrong. Sir, when I heard the