furnished with weapons with which to defend his person, and has he the
right of self-defense?" The whole land became a debating society, and
heaved with excitement, like the heaving of an earthquake. The merchant
pointed to his ledger, and urged caution. But liberty was stronger than
the ledger, and the heaving emotion burst through the statutes and rent
the laws asunder. Soon the Fugitive Slave Law, had become a dead letter.
The South had gone one step too far. Abolition stood suddenly in a new
light; "More abolitionists had been made by this single piece of hostile
legislation," said Greeley, "than Garrison and Phillips could have made
in half a century."

For thirty years Wendell Phillips was the crowned king of the lecture
platform. It was the golden age of the lyceum. Men had more leisure than
to-day. Our era of the drama, music, and travel pictures had not yet
come. The winter nights were long, books few, magazines had not yet
developed, and the people were hungry for instruction and eloquence.
Wendell Phillips achieved the astonishing feat of speaking three hundred
times a year. Eloquence is born of a great theme like the woes and
wrongs of three million slaves. It is sometimes said that oratory is
dying out in our Congress. But Congress is now a board of trade,
discussing duties, protective tariffs on wool, cotton, and hides.
Beecher and Phillips had a great theme--liberty, the emancipation of
millions of slaves. The modern orator in the Senate discusses the
mathematics of woolen goods. It is hard to be eloquent over one salt
barrel and two piles of cowhides. A sermon or a lecture on topics that
fifty years ago would have crowded the greatest room and the street
outside would not to-day draw a corporal's guard.

But in those heroic days, there was a great opportunity, and the
opportunity was matched by the man. Phillips was handsome as an Apollo.