And I said, "Well, a speech that you can remember for twenty-five years must have been a good one!"

"It wasn't the address so much as the man," answered this mother in Israel, and she heaved another small sigh.

And therein did the good old lady drop a confession. I doubt me much whether any woman will remember any speech for a week—she just remembers the man.

And this applies pretty nearly as much to men, too. Is there sex in spirit? Hardly! Thoreau says the character of Jesus was essentially feminine. Herbert Spencer avers, "The high intuitive quality which we call genius is largely feminine in character." "Starr King was the child of his mother, and his best qualities were feminine," said the Reverend E. H. Chapin.

* * * * *

When Starr King's father died the boy was fifteen. There were five younger children and Starr was made man of the house by Destiny's acclaim. Responsibility ripens. This slim, slender youth became a man in a day.

The father had been the pastor of the Charlestown Universalist Church. I suppose it is hardly necessary to take a page and prove that this clergyman in an unpopular church did not leave a large fortune to his family. In truth, he left a legacy of debts. Starr King, the boy of fifteen, left school and became clerk in a drygoods-store. The mother cared for her household and took in sewing.

Joshua Bates, master of the Winthrop School, describes Starr King as he was when the father's death cut off his schooldays: "Slight of build, golden-haired, active, agile, with a homely face which everybody thought was handsome on account of the beaming eyes, the winning smile and the earnest desire of always wanting to do what was best and right."

This kind of boy gets along all right anywhere—God is on his side. The hours in the drygoods-store were long, and on Saturday nights it was nearly midnight before Starr would reach home. But there was a light in the window for him, even if whale-oil was scarce, and the mother was at her sewing. Together they ate their midnight lunch, and counted the earnings of the week.

And the surprise of both that they were getting a living and paying off the debts sort of cleared the atmosphere of its gloom.

In Burke's "Essay on the Sublime," he speaks of the quiet joy that comes through calamity when we discover that the calamity has not really touched us. The death of a father who leaves a penniless widow and a hungry brood comes at first as a shock—the heavens are darkened and hope has fled.

I know a man who was in a railroad wreck—the sleeping-car in which he rode left the track and rolled down an embankment. There was a black interval of horror, and then this man found himself, clad in his underclothes, standing on the upturned car, looking up at the Pleiades and this thought in his mind, "What beauty and peace are in these winter heavens!" The calamity had come—he was absolutely untouched—he was locating the constellations and surprised and happy in his ability to enjoy them.

Starr King and his mother sipped their midnight tea and grew jolly over the thought of their comfortable home; they were clothed and fed, the children well and sleeping soundly in baby abandon upstairs, the debts were being paid. They laughed, did this mother and son, really laughed aloud, when only a month before they had thought that only gloom and misery could ever again be theirs.

They laughed!

And soon the young man's salary was increased—people liked to trade with him—customers came and asked that he might wait on them. He sold more goods than anyone else in his department, and yet he never talked things on to people. He was alert, affable, kindly, and anticipated the wishes and wants of his customers without being subservient, fawning or domineering.

This kind of helper is needed everywhere—the one who gives a willing hand, who puts soul into his service, who brings a glow of good-cheer into all his relations with men.

The doing things with a hearty enthusiasm is often what makes the doer a marked person and his deeds effective. The most ordinary service is dignified when it is performed in that spirit. Every employer wants those who work for him to put heart and mind into the toil. He soon picks out those whose souls are in their service, and gives them evidence of his appreciation. They do not need constant watching. He can trust them in his absence, and so the places of honor and profit naturally gravitate to them.

The years went by, and one fine day Starr King was twenty years of age. All of the debts were paid, the children were going to school, and mother and son faced the world from the vantage-ground of success. Starr had quit the drygoods trade and gone to teaching school on less salary, so as to get more leisure for study.

Incidentally he kept books at the Navy Yard.

About this time Theodore Parker wrote to a friend in Maiden: "I can not come to preach for you as I would like, but with your permission I will send Thomas Starr King. This young man is not a regularly ordained preacher, but he has the grace of God in his heart, and the gift of tongues. He is a rare, sweet spirit, and I know that after you have met him you will thank me for sending him to you."

Then soon we hear of Starr King's being invited to Medford to give a Fourth of July oration, and also of his speaking in the Universalist churches at Cambridge, Waltham, Watertown, Hingham and Salem—sent to these places by Doctor E. H. Chapin, pastor of the Charlestown Universalist Church, and successor to the Reverend Thomas F. King, father of Starr King.

Starr seems to have served as a sort of assistant to Chapin, and thereby revealed his talent and won the heart of the great man. Edwin Hubbell Chapin was only ten years older than Starr King, and at that time had not really discovered himself, but in discovering another he found himself. Twenty years later Beecher and Chapin were to rival each other for first place as America's greatest pulpit orator. These men were always fast friends, yet when they met at convention or conference folks came for miles to see the fire fly. "Where are you going?" once asked Beecher of Chapin when they met by chance on Broadway. "Where am I going?" repeated Chapin. "Why, if you are right in what you preach, you know where I am going." But only a few years were to pass before Chapin said in public in Beecher's presence, "I am jealous of Mr. Beecher—he preaches a better Universalist sermon than I can." Chapin made his mark upon the time: his sermons read as though they were written yesterday, and carry with them a deal of the swing and onward sweep that are usually lost when the orator attempts to write. But if Chapin had done nothing else but discover Starr King, the drygoods-clerk, rescue him from the clutch of commerce and back him on the orator's platform, he deserves the gratitude of generations. And all this I say as a businessman who fully recognizes that commerce is just as honorable and a deal more necessary than oratory. But there were other men to sell thread and calico, and God had special work for Thomas Starr King.

Chapin was a graduate of Bennington Seminary, the school that also graduated the father of Robert Ingersoll. On Chapin's request Theodore Parker, himself a Harvard man, sent Starr King over to Cambridge to preach. Boston was a college town—filled with college traditions, and when one thinks of sending out this untaught stripling to address college men, we can not but admire the temerity of both Chapin and Parker. "He has never attended a Divinity School," writes Chapin to Deacon Obadiah B. Queer of Quincy, "but he is educated just the same. He speaks Greek, Hebrew, French, German, and fairly good English, as you will see. He knows natural history and he knows humanity; and if one knows man and Nature, he comes pretty close to knowing God."

Where did this drygoods-clerk get his education? Ah, I'll tell you—he got his education as the lion's whelp gets his. The lioness does not send her cub away to a lioness that has no cubs in order that he may be taught. The lion nature gets what it needs with its mother's milk and by doing.

Schools and colleges are cumbrous makeshifts, often forcing truth on pupils out of season, and thus making lessons grievous. "The soul knows all things," says Emerson, "and knowledge is only a remembering." "When the time is ripe, men know," wrote Hegel. At the last we can not teach anything—nothing is imparted. We can not make the plants and flowers grow—all we can do is to supply the conditions, and God does the rest. In education we can only supply the conditions for growth—we can not impart, nor force the germs to unfold.

Starr King's mother was his teacher. Together they read good books, and discussed great themes. She read for him and he studied for her. She did not treat him as a child—things that interested her she told to him. The sunshine of her soul was reflected upon his, and thus did he grow. I know a woman whose children will be learned, even though they never enter a schoolroom. This woman is a companion to her children and her mind vitalizes theirs. This does not mean that we should at once do away with schools and colleges, but it does reveal the possible. To read and then discuss with a strong and sympathetic intellect what you read is to make the thought your own—it is a form of exercise that brings growth.

Starr King's mother was not a wonderful nor a famous person—I find no mention of her in Society's Doings of the day—nothing of her dress or equipage. If she was "superbly gowned," we do not know it; if she was ever one of the "unbonneted," history is silent. All we know is, that together they read Bulfinch's "Mythology," Grote's "History of Greece," Plutarch, Dante and Shakespeare. We know that she placed a light in the window for him to make his home-coming cheerful, that together they sipped their midnight tea, that together they laughed, and sometimes wept—but not for long.

* * * * *

In Eighteen Hundred Forty-six Chapin was thirty-two years old. Starr King was twenty-two. A call had reached Chapin to come up higher; but he refused to leave the old church at Charlestown unless Starr King was to succeed him. To place a young man in the position of pastor where he has sat in the pews, his feet not reaching the floor, is most trying. Starr King knew every individual man, woman and child in the church, and they had known him since babyhood. In appearance he was but a boy, and the dignity that is supposed to send conviction home was entirely wanting.

But Chapin had his way and the boy was duly ordained and installed as pastor of the First Universalist Church of Charlestown.

The new pastor fully expected his congregation to give him "absent treatment," but instead, the audience grew—folks even came over from Boston to hear the boy-preacher. His sermons were carefully written, and dealt in the simple, every-day lessons of life. To Starr King this world is paradise enow; it's the best place of which we know, and the way for man to help himself is to try and make it a better place. There is a flavor of Theodore Parker in those early sermons, a trace of Thoreau and much tincture of Emerson—and all this was to the credit of the boy-preacher. His woman's mind absorbed things.

About that time Boston was in very fact the intellectual hub of America. Emerson was forty-three, his "Nature" had been published anonymously, and although it took eight years to sell this edition of five hundred copies, the author was in demand as a lecturer, and in some places society conceded him respectable. Wendell Phillips was addressing audiences that alternately applauded and jeered. Thoreau had discovered the Merrimac and explored Walden Woods; little Doctor Holmes was peregrinating in his One-Hoss Shay, vouchsafing the confidences of his boarding-house; Lowell was beginning to violate the rules of rhetoric; Whittier was making his plea for the runaway slave; and throughout New England the Lecture Lyceum was feeling its way.

A lecture course was then no vaudeville—five concerts and two lectures to take off the curse—not that! The speakers supplied strong meat for men. The stars in the lyceum sky were Emerson, Chapin, Beecher, Holmes, Bartol, Phillips, Ballou, Everett and Lowell. These men made the New England Lyceum a vast pulpit of free speech and advanced thought. And to a degree the Lyceum made these men what they were. They influenced the times and were influenced by the times. They were in competition with each other. A pace had been set, a record made, and the audiences that gathered expected much. An audience gets just what it deserves and no more. If you have listened to a poor speech, blame yourself.

In the life of George Francis Train, he tells that in Eighteen Hundred Forty Emerson spoke in Waltham for five dollars and four quarts of oats for his horse—now he received twenty-five dollars. Chapin got the same, and when the Committee could not afford this, he referred them to Starr King, who would lecture for five dollars and supply his own horse-feed.

Two years went by and calls came for Starr King to come up higher. Worcester would double his salary if he would take a year's course at the Harvard Divinity School. Starr showed the letter to Chapin, and both laughed. Worcester was satisfied with Starr King as he was, but what would Springfield say if they called a man who had no theological training? And then it was that Chapin said, "Divinity is not taught in the Harvard Divinity School," which sounds like a paraphrase of Ernest Renan's, "You will find God anywhere but in a theological seminary."

King declined the call to Worcester, but harkened to one from the Hollis Street Church of Boston. He went over from Universalism to Unitarianism and still remained a Universalist—and this created quite a dust among the theologs. Little men love their denomination with a jealous love—truth is secondary—they see microscopic difference where big men behold only unity.

It was about this time that Starr King pronounced this classic: "The difference between Universalism and Unitarianism is that Universalists believe that God is too good to damn them; and the Unitarians believe that they are too good to be damned."

At the Hollis Street Church this stripling of twenty-four now found himself being compared with the foremost preachers of America. And the man grew with his work, rising to the level of events. It was at the grave of Oliver Wendell Holmes that Edward Everett Hale said, "The five men who have influenced the literary and intellectual thought of America most, believed in their own divinity no less than in the divinity of Jesus of Nazareth."

The destiny of the liberal church is not to become strong and powerful, but to make all other denominations more liberal. When Chapin accused Beecher of preaching Universalist sermons, it was a home thrust, because Beecher would never have preached such sermons had not Murray, Ballou, Theodore Parker, Chapin and Starr King done so first—and Beecher supplied the goods called for.

Starr King's voice was deep, melodious and far-reaching, and it was not an acquired "bishop's voice"—it was his own. The biggest basso I ever heard was just five feet high and weighed one hundred twenty in his stockings; Brignoli, the tenor, weighed two hundred forty. Avoirdupois as a rule lessens the volume of the voice and heightens the register—you can't have both adipose and chest tone. Webster and Starr King had voices very much alike, and Webster, by the way, wasn't the big man physically that the school readers proclaim. It was his gigantic head and the royal way he carried himself that made the Liverpool stevedores say, "There goes the King of America."

There was no pomposity about Starr King. Doctor Bartol has said that when King lectured in a new town his homely, boyish face always caused a small spasm of disappointment or merriment to sweep over the audience. But when he spoke he was a transformed being, and his deep, mellow voice would hush the most inveterate whisperers.

For eleven years Starr King remained pastor of the Hollis Street Church. During the last years of his pastorate he was much in demand as a lecturer, and his voice was heard in all the principal cities as far west as Chicago.

His lecture, "Substance and Show," deserves to rank with Wendell Phillips' "The Lost Arts." In truth it is very much like Phillips' lecture. In "The Lost Arts" Phillips tells in easy conversational way of the wonderful things that once existed; and Starr King relates in the same manner the story of some of the wonderful things that are right here and all around us. It reveals the mind of the man, his manner and thought, as well as any of his productions. The great speech is an evolution, and this lecture, given many times in the Eastern States under various titles, did not touch really high-water mark until King reached California and had cut loose from manuscript and tradition. An extract seems in order:

Most persons, doubtless, if you place before them a paving-stone and a slip of paper with some writing on it, would not hesitate to say that there is as much more substance in the rock than in the paper as there is heaviness. Yet they might make a great mistake. Suppose that the slip of paper contains the sentence, "God is love"; or, "Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself"; or, "All men have moral rights by reason of heavenly parentage," then the paper represents more force and substance than the stone. Heaven and earth may pass away, but such words can never die out or become less real.

The word "substance" means that which stands under and supports anything else. Whatever then creates, upholds, classifies anything which our senses behold, though we can not handle, see, taste or smell it, is more substantial than the object itself. In this way the soul which vivifies, moves and supports the body is a more potent substance than the hard bones and heavy flesh which it vitalizes. A ten-pound weight falling on your head affects you unpleasantly as substance, much more so than a leaf of the New Testament, if dropped in the same direction; but there is a way in which a page of the New Testament may fall upon a nation and split it, or infuse itself into its bulk and give it strength and permanence. We should be careful, therefore, what test we adopt in order to decide the relative stability of things.

There is a very general tendency to deny that ideal forces have any practical power. But there have been several thinkers whose skepticism has an opposite direction. "We can not," they say, "attribute external reality to the sensations we feel." We need not wonder that this theory has failed to convince the unmetaphysical common-sense of people that a stone post is merely a stubborn thought, and that the bite of a dog is nothing but an acquaintance with a pugnacious, four-footed conception. When a man falls downstairs it is not easy to convince him that his thought simply tumbles along an inclined series of perceptions and comes to a conclusion that breaks his head; least of all, can you induce a man to believe that the scolding of his wife is nothing but the buzzing of his own waspish thoughts, and her too free use of his purse only the loss of some golden fancies from his memory. We are all safe against such idealism as Bishop Berkeley reasoned out so logically. Byron's refutation of it is neat and witty:

"When Bishop Berkeley says there is no matter, It is no matter what Bishop Berkeley says."

And yet, by more satisfactory evidence than that which the idealists propose, we are warned against confounding the conception of substance with matter, and confining it to things we can see and grasp. Science steps in and shows us that the physical system of things leans on spirit. We talk of the world of matter, but there is no such world. Everything about us is a mixture or marriage of matter and spirit. A world of matter—there would be no motion, no force, no form, no order, no beauty, in the universe as it now is; organization meets us at every step and wherever we look; organization implies spirit—something that rules, disposes, penetrates and vivifies matter.

See what a sermon astronomy preaches as to the substantial power of invisible things. If the visible universe is so stupendous, what shall we think of the unseen force and vitality in whose arms all its splendors rest? It is no gigantic Atlas, as the Greeks fancied, that upholds the celestial sphere; all the constellations are kept from falling by an impalpable energy that uses no muscles and no masonry. The ancient mathematician, Archimedes, once said, "Give me a foot of ground outside the globe to stand upon, and I will make a lever that will lift the world." The invisible lever of gravitation, however, without any fulcrum or purchase, does lift the globe, and makes it waltz, too, with its blonde lunar partner, twelve hundred miles a minute to the music of the sun—ay, and heaves sun and systems and Milky Way in majestic cotillions on its ethereal floor.

You grasp an iron ball, and call it hard; it is not the iron that is hard, but cohesive force that packs the particles of metal into intense sociability. Let the force abate, and the same metal becomes like mush; let it disappear, and the ball is a heap of powder which your breath scatters in the air. If the cohesive energy in Nature should get tired and unclench its grasp of matter, our earth would instantly become "a great slump"; so that which we tread on is not material substance, but matter braced up by a spiritual substance, for which it serves as the form and show.

All the peculiarities of rock and glass, diamond, ice and crystal are due to the working of unseen military forces that employ themselves under ground—in caverns, beneath rivers, in mountain crypts, and through the coldest nights, drilling companies of atoms into crystalline battalions and squares, and every caprice of a fantastic order.

When we turn to the vegetable kingdom, is not the revelation still more wonderful? The forms which we see grow out of substances and are supported by forces which we do not see. The stuff out of which all vegetable appearances are made is reducible to oxygen, hydrogen, carbon and nitrogen. How does it happen that this common stock is worked up in such different ways? Why is a lily woven out of it in one place and a dahlia in another, a grapevine here, and a honeysuckle there—the orange in Italy, the palm in Egypt, the olive in Greece and the pine in Maine? Simply because a subtile force of a peculiar kind is at work wherever any vegetable structure adorns the ground, and takes to itself its favorite robe. We have outgrown the charming fancy of the Greeks that every tree has its Dryad that lives in it, animates it, and dies when the tree withers. But we ought, for the truth's sake, to believe that a life-spirit inhabits every flower and shrub, and protects it against the prowling forces of destruction. Look at a full-sized oak, the rooted Leviathan of the fields. Judging by your senses and by the scales, you would say that the substance of the noble tree was its bulk of bark and bough and branch and leaves and sap, the cords of woody and moist matter that compose it and make it heavy. But really its substance is that which makes it an oak, that which weaves its bark and glues it to the stem, and wraps its rings of fresh wood around the trunk every year, and pushes out its boughs and clothes its twigs with breathing leaves and sucks up nutriment from the soil continually, and makes the roots clench the ground with their fibrous fingers as a purchase against the storm, and at last holds aloft its tons of matter against the constant tug and wrath of gravitation, and swings its Briarean arms in triumph, in defiance of the gale. Were it not for this energetic essence that crouches in the acorn and stretches its limbs every year, there would be no oak; the matter that clothes it would enjoy its stupid slumber; and when the forest monarch stands up in his sinewy, lordliest pride, let the pervading life-power, and its vassal forces that weigh nothing at all, be annihilated, and the whole structure would wither in a second to inorganic dust. So every gigantic fact in Nature is the index and vesture of a gigantic force. Everything which we call organization that spots the landscape of Nature is a revelation of secret force that has been wedded to matter, and if the spiritual powers that have thus domesticated themselves around us should be canceled, the whole planet would be a huge Desert of Sahara—a bleak sand-ball, without shrub, grass-blade or moss.

As we rise in the scale of forces towards greater subtility, the forces become more important and efficient. Water is more intimately concerned with life than rock, air higher in the rank of service than water, electric and magnetic agencies more powerful than air; and light, the most delicate, is the supreme magician of all. Just think how much expenditure of mechanical strength is necessary to water a city in the hot summer months. What pumping and tugging and wearisome trudging of horses with the great sprinklers over the tedious pavement! But see by what beautiful and noiseless force Nature waters the world! The sun looks steadily on the ocean, and its beams lift lakes of water into the air, tossing it up thousands of feet with their delicate fingers, and carefully picking every grain of salt from it before they let it go. No granite reservoirs are needed to hold in the Cochituates and Crotons of the atmosphere, but the soft outlines of the clouds hem in the vast weight of the upper tides that are to cool the globe, and the winds harness themselves as steeds to the silken caldrons and hurry them along through space, while they disburse their rivers of moisture from their great height so lightly that seldom a violet is crushed by the rudeness with which the stream descends.

Our conceptions of strength and endurance are so associated with visible implements and mechanical arrangements that it is hard to divorce them, and yet the stream of electric fire that splits an ash is not a ponderable thing, and the way in which the lodestone reaches the ten-pound weight and makes it jump is not perceptible. You would think the man had pretty good molars that should gnaw a spike like a stick of candy, but a bottle of innocent-looking hydrogen-gas will chew up a piece of bar-iron as though it were some favorite Cavendish.

The prominent lesson of science to men, therefore, is faith in the intangible and invisible. Shall we talk of matter as the great reality of the world, the prominent substance? It is nothing but the battleground of terrific forces. Every particle of matter, the chemists tell us, is strained up to its last degree of endurance. The glistening bead of dew from which the daisy gently nurses its strength, and which a sunbeam may dissipate, is the globular compromise of antagonistic powers that would shake this building in their unchained rage. And so every atom of matter is the slave of imperious masters that never let it alone. It is nursed and caressed, next bandied about, and soon cuffed and kicked by its invisible overseers. Poor atoms! No abolition societies will ever free them from their bondage, no colonization movement waft them to any physical Liberia. For every particle of matter is bound by eternal fealty to some spiritual lords, to be pinched by one and squeezed by another and torn asunder by a third; now to be painted by this and now blistered by that; now tormented with heat and soon chilled with cold; hurried from the Arctic Circle to sweat at the Equator, and then sent on an errand to the Southern Pole; forced through transmigrations of fish, fowl and flesh; and, if in some corner of creation the poor thing finds leisure to die, searched out and whipped to life again and kept in its constant round.

Thus the stuff that we weigh, handle and tread upon is only the show of invisible substances, the facts over which subtle and mighty forces rule.

* * * * *

Starr King was that kind of plant which needs to be repotted in order to make it flower at its very best. Events kept tugging to loosen his tendrils from his early environments. People who live on Boston Bay like to remain there. We have all heard of the good woman who died and went to Heaven, and after a short sojourn there was asked how she liked it, and she sighed and said, "Ah, yes, it is very beautiful, but it isn't East Somerville!"

Had Starr King consented to remain in Boston he might have held his charge against the ravages of time, secreted a curate, taken on a becoming buffer of adipose, and glided off by imperceptible degrees on to the Superannuated List.

But early in that historic month of April, Eighteen Hundred Sixty-one, he set sail for California, having accepted a call from the First Unitarian Church of San Francisco. This was his first trip to the Pacific Coast, but New England people had preceded him, and not being able to return, they wanted Boston to come to them. The journey was made by the way of Panama, without any special event. The pilot who met the ship outside of Golden Gate bore them the first news that Sumter had been fired upon, and the bombardment was at the time when the ship that bore Starr King was only a few miles from South Carolina's coast.

With prophetic vision Starr King saw the struggle that was to come, and the words of Webster, uttered many years before, rushed to his lips:

"When my eyes shall be turned to behold for the last time the sun in heaven, may I not see him shining on the broken and dishonored fragments of a once glorious Union; on States dissevered, discordant, belligerent; on a land rent with civil feuds, or drenched, it may be, in fraternal blood! Let their last feeble and lingering glance rather behold the gorgeous ensign of the republic now known and honored throughout the earth, still full high advanced, its arms and trophies streaming in their original luster, not a stripe erased nor polluted, nor a single star obscured, bearing for its motto no such miserable interrogatory as 'What is all this worth?' nor those other words of delusion and folly, 'Liberty first and Union afterwards'; but everywhere, spread over all in characters of living light, blazing on all its ample folds, as they float over the sea and over the land, and in every wind under the whole heavens, that other sentiment, dear to every true American heart—Liberty and Union, now and forever, one and inseparable!"

The landing was made on Saturday, and the following day Starr King spoke for the first time in California. An hour before the service was to begin, the church was wedged tight. The preacher had much difficulty in making his way through the dense mass of humanity to reach the pulpit. "Is that the man?" went up the smothered exclamation, as Starr King reached the platform and faced his audience. His slight, slender figure and boyish face were plainly a disappointment, but this was not to last. The preacher had prepared a sermon—such a sermon as he had given many times to well-dressed, orderly and cultured Boston.

And if this California audience was surprised, the speaker also was no less. The men to women were as seven to one. He saw before him a sea of bronzed and bearded faces, earnest, attentive and hungry for truth. There were occasional marks of dissipation and the riot of the senses, softened by excess into penitence—whipped out and homesick. Here were miners in red-flannel shirts, sailors, soldiers in uniform and soldiers of fortune. The preacher looked at the motley mass in a vain attempt to pick out his old friends from New England. The genteel, slightly blase quality of culture that leans back in its cushioned pew and courteously waits to be instructed, was not there. These people did not lean back: they leaned forward, and with parted lips they listened for every word. There was no choir, and when "an old familiar hymn" was lined off by a volunteer who knew his business, that great audience arose and sang as though it would shake the rafters of heaven.

Those who go down to the sea in ships, sing; shepherds who tend their flocks by night, sing; men in the forest or those who follow the trackless plains, sing. Congregational singing is most popular among those who live far apart—to get together and sing is a solace. Loneliness, separation and heart-hunger all drive men into song.

These men, many of them far from home, lifted up their voices, and the sounds surged through that church and echoed, surged again and caught even the preacher in their winding waves. He started in to give one sermon and gave another. The audience, the time, the place, acted upon him.

Oratory is essentially a pioneer product, a rustic article. Great sermons and great speeches are given only to people who have come from afar.

Starr King forgot his manuscript and pulpit manners. His deep voice throbbed and pulsed with emotion, and the tensity of the times was upon him. Without once referring directly to Sumter, his address was a call to arms.

He spoke for an hour, and when he sat down he knew that he had won. The next Sunday the place was again packed, and then followed urgent invitations that he should speak during the week in a larger hall.

California was trembling in the balances, and orators were not wanting to give out the arguments of Calhoun. They showed that the right of secession was plainly provided for in the Constitution. Lincoln's call for troops was coldly received, and from several San Francisco pulpits orthodox clergymen were expressing deep regret that the President was plunging the country into civil war.

The heart of Starr King burned with shame—to him there was but one side to this question—the Union must be preserved.

One man who had known King in Massachusetts wrote back home saying: "You would not know Starr King—he is not the orderly man of genteel culture you once had in Boston. He is a torrent of eloquence, so heartfelt, so convincing, so powerful, that when he speaks on Sunday afternoon out on the sand-hills, he excites the multitude into a whirlwind of applause, with a basso undertone of dissent, which, however, seems to grow gradually less."

Loyalty to the Union was to him the one vital issue. His fight was not with individuals—he made no personal issues. And in several joint debates his courteous treatment of his adversary won converts for his cause. He took pains to say that personally he had only friendship and pity for the individuals who upheld secession and slavery—"The man in the wrong needs friends as never before, since he has ceased to be his own. Do we blame a blind man whom we see rushing towards a precipice?"

From that first Sunday he preached in San Francisco, his life was an ovation wherever he went. Wherever he was advertised to speak, multitudes were there to hang upon his words. He spoke in all the principal towns of California; and often on the plains, in the mountains, or by the seashore, men would gather from hundreds of miles to hear him.

He gave himself, and before he had been in California a year, the State was safe for the Union, and men and treasure were being sent to Lincoln's aid. The fame of Starr King reached the President, and he found time to write several letters to the orator, thanking him for what he had done. It was in one of these letters that Lincoln wrote, "The only sermons I have ever been able to read and enjoy are those of John Murray"—a statement which some have attempted to smile away as showing the Rail-Splitter's astute diplomacy.

Starr King gave his life to the Cause. He as much died for the Union as though he had fallen stricken by flying lead upon the field. And he knew what he was doing, but in answer to his warning friends he said, "I have only one life to live and now is my time to spend it."

For three years, lacking two months, he spoke and preached several times every week. All he made and all he was he freely gave.

For that frail frame this life of intensity had but one end.

The Emancipation Proclamation had been issued, but Lee's surrender was yet to be.

"May I live to see unity and peace for my country," was the constant prayer of the devoted preacher.

Starr King died March Fourth, Eighteen Hundred Sixty-four, aged forty years. The closing words of his lecture on Socrates might well be applied to himself: "Down the river of Life, by its Athenian banks, he had floated upon his raft of reason serene, in cloudy as in smiling weather. And now the night is rushing down, and he has reached the mouth of the stream, and the great ocean is before him, dim-heaving in the dusk. But he betrays no fear. There is land ahead, he thought; eternal continents there are, that rise in constant light beyond the gloom. He trusted still in the raft his soul had built, and with a brave farewell to the true friends who stood by him on the shore, he put out into the darkness, a moral Columbus, trusting in his haven on the faith of an idea."



HENRY WARD BEECHER

You know how the heart is subject to freshets; you know how the mother, always loving her child, yet seeing in it some new wile of affection, will catch it up and cover it with kisses and break forth in a rapture of loving. Such a kind of heart-glow fell from the Savior upon that young man who said to him, "Good Master, what good thing shall I do that I may inherit eternal life?" It is said, "Then Jesus, beholding him, loved him."

—Henry Ward Beecher



The influence of Henry Ward Beecher upon his time was marked. And now the stream of his life is lost amid the ocean of our being. As a single drop of aniline in a barrel of water will tint the whole mass, so has the entire American mind been colored through the existence of this one glowing personality. He placed a new interpretation on religion, and we are different people because he lived.

He was not constructive, not administrative—he wrote much, but as literature his work has small claim on immortality. He was an orator, and the business of the orator is to inspire other men to think and act for themselves.

Orators live but in memory. Their destiny is to be the sweet, elusive fragrance of oblivion—the thyme and mignonette of things that were.

The limitations in the all-around man are by-products which are used by destiny in the making of orators. The welling emotions, the vivid imagination, the forgetfulness of self, the abandon to feeling—all these things in Wall Street are spurious coin. No prudent man was ever an orator—no cautious man ever made a multitude change its mind, when it had vowed it would not.

Oratory is indiscretion set to music.

The great orator is great on account of his weaknesses as well as on account of his strength. So why should we expect the orator to be the impeccable man of perfect parts?

These essays attempt to give the man—they are neither a vindication nor an apology.

Edmund Gosse has recently said something so wise and to the point on the subject of biography that I can not resist the temptation to quote him:

If the reader will but bear with me so far as to endure the thesis that the first theoretical object of the biographer should be indiscretion, not discretion, I will concede almost everything practical to delicacy. But this must be granted to me: that the aim of all portraiture ought to be the emphasizing of what makes the man different from, not like, other men. The widow almost always desires that her deceased hero should be represented as exactly like all other respectable men, only a little grander, a little more glorified. She hates, as only a bad biographer can hate, the telling of the truth with respect to those faults and foibles which made the light and shade of his character. This, it appears, was the primitive view of biography. The mass of medieval memorials was of the "expanded-tract" order: it was mainly composed of lives of the saints, tractates in which the possible and the impossible were mingled in inextricable disorder, but where every word was intended directly for edification. Here the biographer was a moralist whose hold upon exact truth of statement was very loose indeed, but who was determined that every word he wrote should strengthen his readers in the faith. Nor is this generation of biographers dead today. Half the lives of the great and good men, which are published in England and America, are expanded tracts. Let the biographer be tactful, but do not let him be cowardly; let him cultivate delicacy, but avoid its ridiculous parody, prudery.

And I also quote this from James Anthony Froude:

The usual custom in biography is to begin with the brightest side and to leave the faults to be discovered afterwards. It is dishonest and it does not answer. Of all literary sins, Carlyle himself detested most a false biography. Faults frankly acknowledged are frankly forgiven. Faults concealed work always like poison. Burns' offenses were made no secret of. They are now forgotten, and Burns stands without a shadow on him, the idol of his countrymen.

Byron's diary was destroyed, and he remains and will remain with a stain of suspicion about him, which revives and will revive, and will never be wholly obliterated. "The truth shall make you free" in biography as in everything else. Falsehood and concealment are a great man's worst enemy.

* * * * *

Henry Ward Beecher was born at Litchfield, Connecticut, June Twenty-third, Eighteen Hundred Thirteen. He was the eighth child of Lyman and Roxana Foote Beecher. Like Lincoln and various other great men, Beecher had two mothers: the one who gave him birth, and the one who cared for him as he grew up. Beecher used to take with him on his travels an old daguerreotype of his real mother, and in the cover of the case, beneath the glass, was a lock of her hair—fair in color, and bright as if touched by the kiss of the summer sun. Often he would take this picture out and apostrophize it, just as he would the uncut gems that he always carried in his pockets. "My first mother," he used to call her; and to him she stood as a sort of deity. "My first mother stands to me for love; my second mother for discipline; my father for justice," he once said to Halliday.

I am not sure that Beecher had a well-defined idea of either discipline or justice, but love to him was a very vivid and personal reality. He knew what it meant—infinite forgiveness, a lifelong, yearning tenderness, a Something that suffereth long and is kind. This he preached for fifty years, and he preached little else. Lyman Beecher proclaimed the justice of God; Henry Ward Beecher told of His love. Lyman Beecher was a logician, but Henry Ward was a lover. There is a task on hand for the man who attempts to prove that Nature is kind, or that God is love. Perhaps man himself, with all his imperfections, gives us the best example of love that the universe has to offer. In preaching the love of God, Henry Ward Beecher revealed his own; for oratory, like literature, is only a confession.

"My first mother is always pleading for me—she reaches out her arms to me—her delicate, long, tapering fingers stroke my hair—I hear her voice, gentle and low!" Do you say this is the language of o'erwrought emotion? I say to you it is simply the language of love. This mother, dead and turned to dust, who passed out when the boy was scarce three years old, stood to him for the ideal. Love, anyway, is a matter of the imagination, and he who can not imagine can not love, and love is from within. The lover clothes the beloved in the garments of his fancy, and woe to him if he ever loses the power to imagine.

Have you not often noticed how the man or woman whose mother died before a time that the child could recall, and whose memory clusters around a faded picture and a lock of hair—how this person is thrice blessed in that the ideal is always a shelter when the real palls? Love is a refuge and a defense. The Law of Compensation is kind: Lincoln lived, until the day of his death, bathed in the love of Nancy Hanks, that mother, worn, yellow and sad, who gave him birth, and yet whom he had never known. No child ever really lost its mother—nothing is ever lost. Men are really only grown-up children, and the longing to be mothered is not effaced by the passing years. The type is well shown in the life of Meissonier, whose mother died in his childhood, but she was near him to the last. In his journal he wrote this: "It is the morning of my seventieth birthday. What a long time to look back upon! This morning, at the hour my mother gave me birth, I wished my first thoughts to be of her. Dear Mother, how often have the tears risen at the remembrance of you! It was your absence—my longing for you—that made you so dear to me. The love of my heart goes out to you! Do you hear me, Mother, crying and calling for you? How sweet it must be to have a mother!"

* * * * *

One might suppose that a childless woman suddenly presented by Fate with an exacting husband and a brood of nine would soon be a candidate for nervous prostration; Sarah Porter Beecher, however, rose to the level of events, and looked after her household with diligence and a conscientious heart. Little Henry Ward was four years old and wore a red-flannel dress, outgrown by one of the girls. He was chubby, with a full-moon face and yellow curls, which were so much trouble to take care of that they were soon cut off, after he had set the example of cutting off two himself. He talked as though his mouth were full of hot mush. If sent to a neighbor's on an errand, he usually forgot what he was sent for, or else explained matters in such a way that he brought back the wrong thing. His mother meant to be kind; her patience was splendid; and one's heart goes out to her in sympathy when we think of her faithful efforts to teach the lesser catechism to this baby savage who much preferred to make mud-pies.

Little Henry Ward had a third mother who did him much gentle benefit, and that was his sister Harriet, two years his senior. These little child-mothers who take care of the younger members of the family deserve special seats in Paradise. Harriet taught little Henry Ward to talk plainly, to add four and four, and to look solemn when he did not feel so—and thus escape the strap behind the kitchen-door. His bringing-up was of the uncaressing, let-alone kind.

Lyman Beecher was a deal better than his religion; for his religion, like that of most people, was an inheritance, not an evolution. Piety settled down upon the household like a pall every Saturday at sundown; and the lessons taught were largely from the Old Testament.

These big, bustling, strenuous households are pretty good life-drill for the members. The children are taught self-reliance, to do without each other, to do for others, and the older members educate the younger ones. It is a great thing to leave children alone. Henry Ward Beecher has intimated in various places in his books how the whole Beecher brood loved their father, yet as precaution against misunderstanding they made the sudden sneak and the quick side-step whenever they saw him coming.

Village life with a fair degree of prosperity, but not too much, is an education in itself. The knowledge gained is not always classic, nor even polite, but it is all a part of the great, seething game of life. Henry Ward Beecher was not an educated man in the usual sense of the word. At school he carved his desk, made faces at the girls, and kept the place in a turmoil generally: doing the wrong thing, just like many another bumpkin. At home he carried in the wood, picked up chips, worked in the garden in Summer, and shoveled out the walks in Winter. He knew when the dishwater was worth saving to mix up with meal for the chickens, and when it should be put on the asparagus-bed or the rosebushes. He could make a lye-leach, knew that it was lucky to set hens on thirteen eggs, realized that hens' eggs hatched in three weeks, and ducks' in four. He knew when the berries ripened, where the crows nested, and could find the bee-trees by watching the flight of the bees after they had gotten their fill on the basswood-blossoms. He knew all the birds that sang in the branches—could tell what birds migrated and what not—was acquainted with the flowers and weeds and fungi—knew where the rabbits burrowed—could pick the milkweed that would cure warts, and tell the points of the compass by examining the bark of the trees. He was on familiar terms with all the ragamuffins in the village, and regarded the man who kept the livery-stable as the wisest person in New England, and the stage-driver as the wittiest.

Lyman Beecher was a graduate of Yale, and Henry Ward would have been, had he been able to pass the preparatory examinations. But he couldn't, and finally he was bundled off to Amherst, very much as we now send boys to a business college when they get plucked at the high school. But it matters little—give the boys time—some of them ripen slowly, and others there be who know more at sixteen than they will ever know again, like street gamins with the wit of debauchees, rareripes at ten, and rotten at the core. "Delay adolescence," wrote Doctor Charcot to an anxious mother; "delay adolescence, and you bank energy until it is needed. If your boy is stupid at fourteen, thank God! Dulness is a fulcrum and your son is getting ready to put a lever under the world."

At Amherst, Henry Ward stood well at the foot of his class. He read everything except what was in the curriculum, and never allowed his studies to interfere with his college course. He reveled in the debating societies, and was always ready to thrash out any subject in wordy warfare against all comers. His temper was splendid, his good-nature sublime. If an opponent got the best of him he enjoyed it as much as the audience—he could wait his turn. The man who can laugh at himself, and who is not anxious to have the last word, is right in the suburbs of greatness.

However, the Beechers all had a deal of positivism in their characters. Thomas K. Beecher of Elmira, in Eighteen Hundred Fifty-six, declared he would not shave until John C. Fremont was elected President. It is needless to add that he wore whiskers the rest of his life.

When Henry Ward was nineteen his father received a call to become President of Lane Theological Seminary at Cincinnati, and Henry Ward accompanied him as assistant. The stalwart old father had now come to recognize the worth of his son, and for the first time parental authority was waived and they were companions. They were very much alike—exuberant health, energy plus, faith and hope to spare. And Henry Ward now saw that there was a gentle, tender and yearning side to his father's nature, into which the world caught only glimpses. Lyman Beecher was not free—he was bound by a hagiograph riveted upon his soul; and so to a degree his whole nature was cramped and tortured in his struggles between the "natural man" and the "spiritual." The son was taught by antithesis, and inwardly vowed he would be free. The one word that looms large in the life of Beecher is Liberty.

* * * * *

Henry Ward Beecher died aged seventy-four, having preached since he was twenty-three. During that time he was pastor of three churches—two years at Lawrenceburg, Indiana, six years at Indianapolis, and forty-three years in Brooklyn. It was in Eighteen Hundred Thirty-seven that he became pastor of the Congregational Church at Lawrenceburg. This town was then a rival of Cincinnati. It had six churches—several more than were absolutely needed. The Baptists were strong, the Presbyterians were strenuous, the Episcopalians were exclusive, while the Congregationalists were at ebb-tide through the rascality of a preacher who had recently decamped and thrown a blanket of disgrace over the whole denomination for ten miles up the creek. Thus were things when Henry Ward Beecher assumed his first charge. The membership of the church was made up of nineteen women and one man. The new pastor was sexton as well as preacher—he swept out, rang the bell, lighted the candles and locked up after service.

Beecher remained in Lawrenceburg two years. The membership had increased to one hundred six men and seventy women. I suppose it will not be denied as an actual fact that women bolster the steeples so that they stay on the churches. From the time women held the rope and let Saint Paul down in safety from the wall in a basket, women have maintained the faith. But Beecher was a man's preacher from first to last. He was a bold, manly man, making his appeal to men.

Two years at Lawrenceburg and he moved to Indianapolis, the capital of the State, his reputation having been carried thither by the member from Posey County, who incautiously boasted that his "deestrick" had the most powerful preacher of any town on the Ohio River.

At Indianapolis, Beecher was a success at once. He entered into the affairs of the people with an ease and a good nature that won the hearts of this semi-pioneer population. His "Lectures to Young Men," delivered Sunday evenings to packed houses, still have a sale. This bringing religion down from the lofty heights of theology and making it a matter of every-day life was eminently Beecheresque. And the reason it was a success was because it fitted the needs of the people. Beecher expressed what the people were thinking. Mankind clings to the creed; we will not burn our bridges—we want the religion of our mothers, yet we crave the simple common-sense we can comprehend as well as the superstition we can't. Beecher's task was to rationalize orthodoxy so as to make it palatable to thinking minds. "I can't ride two horses at one time," once said Robert Ingersoll to Beecher, "but possibly I'll be able to yet, for tomorrow I am going to hear you preach." Then it was that Beecher offered to write Ingersoll's epitaph, which he proceeded to do by scribbling two words on the back of an envelope, thus: "Robert Burns."

But these men understood and had a thorough respect for each other. Once at a mass-meeting at Cooper Union, Beecher introduced Ingersoll as the "first, foremost and most gifted of all living orators."

And Ingersoll, not to be outdone, referred in his speech to Beecher as the "one orthodox clergyman in the world who has eliminated hell from his creed and put the devil out of church, and still stands in his pulpit."

Six years at Indianapolis put Beecher in command of his armament. And Brooklyn, seeking a man of power, called him thither. His first sermon in Plymouth Church outlined his course; and the principles then laid down he was to preach for fifty years: the love of God; the life of Christ, not as a sacrifice, but as an example—our Elder Brother; and Liberty—liberty to think, to express, to act, to become.

It would have been worth going miles to see this man as he appeared at Plymouth Church those first years of his ministry. Such a specimen of mental, spiritual and physical manhood Nature produces only once in a century. Imagine a man of thirty-five, when manhood has not yet left youth behind, height five feet ten, weight one hundred eighty, a body like that of a Greek god, and a mind poised, sure, serene, with a fund of good nature that could not be overdrawn; a face cleanly shaven; a wealth of blond hair falling to his broad shoulders; eyes of infinite blue—eyes like the eyes of Christ when He gazed upon the penitent thief on the cross, or eyes that flash fire, changing their color with the mood of the man—a radiant, happy man, the cheeriest, sunniest nature that ever dwelt in human body, with a sympathy that went out to everybody and everything—children, animals, the old, the feeble, the fallen—a man too big to be jealous, too noble to quibble, a man so manly that he would accept guilt rather than impute it to another. If he had been possessed of less love he would have been a stronger man. The generous nature lies open and unprotected—through its guilelessness it allows concrete rascality to come close enough to strike it. "One reason why Beecher had so many enemies was because he bestowed so many benefits," said Rufus Choate.

Talmage did not discover himself until he was forty-six; Beecher was Beecher at thirty-five. He was as great then as he ever was—it was too much to ask that he should evolve into something more—Nature has to distribute her gifts. Had Beecher grown after his thirty-fifth year, as he grew from twenty-five to thirty-five, he would have been a Colossus that would have disturbed the equilibrium of the thinking world, and created revolution instead of evolution. The opposition toward great men is right and natural—it is a part of Nature's plan to hold the balance true, "lest ye become as gods!"

* * * * *

I traveled with Major James B. Pond one lecture season, and during that time heard only two themes discussed, John Brown and Henry Ward Beecher. These were his gods. Pond fought with John Brown in Kansas, shoulder to shoulder, and it was only through an accident that he was not with Brown at Harpers Ferry, in which case his soul would have gone marching on with that of Old John Brown. From Eighteen Hundred Sixty to Eighteen Hundred Sixty-six Pond belonged to the army, and was stationed in Western Missouri, where there was no commissariat, where they took no prisoners, and where men like Jesse James lived, who never knew the war was over. Pond had so many notches cut on the butt of his pistol that he had ceased to count them.

He was big, brusk, quibbling, insulting, dictatorial, painstaking, considerate and kind. He was the most exasperating and lovable man I ever knew. He left a trail of enemies wherever he traveled, and the irony of fate is shown in that he was allowed to die peacefully in his bed.

I cut my relationship with him because I did not care to be pained by seeing his form dangling from the crossbeam of a telegraph-pole. When I lectured at Washington a policeman appeared at the box-office and demanded the amusement-license fee of five dollars. "Your authority?" roared Pond. And the policeman not being able to explain, Pond kicked him down the stairway, and kept his club as a souvenir. We got out on the midnight train before warrants could be served.

He would often push me into the first carriage when we arrived at a town, and sometimes the driver would say, "This is a private carriage," or, "This rig is engaged," and Pond would reply, "What's that to me?—drive us to the hotel—you evidently don't know whom you are talking to!" And so imperious was his manner that his orders were usually obeyed. Arriving at the hotel, he would hand out double fare. It was his rule to pay too much or too little. Yet as a manager he was perfection—he knew the trains to a minute, and always knew, too, what to do if we missed the first train, or if the train was late. At the hall he saw that every detail was provided for. If the place was too hot, or too cold, somebody got thoroughly damned. If the ventilation was bad, and he could not get the windows open, he would break them out. If you questioned his balance-sheet he would the next day flash up an expense-account that looked like a plumber's bill and give you fifty cents as your share of the spoils. At hotels he always got a room with two beds, if possible. I was his prisoner—he was despotically kind—he regulated my hours of sleep, my meals, my exercise. He would throw intruding visitors downstairs as average men shoo chickens or scare cats. He was a bundle of profanity and unrest until after the lecture. Then we would go to our room, and he would talk like a windmill. He would crawl into his bed and I into mine, and then he would continue telling Beecher stories half the night, comparing me with Beecher to my great disadvantage. A dozen times I have heard him tell how Beecher would say, "Pond, never consult me about plans or explain details—if you do, our friendship ceases." Beecher was glad to leave every detail of travel to Pond, and Pond delighted in assuming sole charge. Beecher never audited an account—he just took what Pond gave him and said nothing. In this Beecher was very wise—he managed Pond and Pond never knew it. Pond had a pride in paying Beecher as much as possible, and found gratification in giving the money to Beecher instead of keeping it. He was immensely proud of his charge and grew to have an idolatrous regard for Beecher. Pond's brusk ways amused Beecher, and the Osawatomie experience made him a sort of hero in Beecher's eyes.

Beecher took Pond at his true value, regarded his wrath as a child's tantrum, and let him do most of the talking as well as the business. And Beecher's great welling heart touched a side of Pond's nature that few knew existed at all—a side that he masked with harshness; for, in spite of his perversity, Pond had his virtues—he was simple as a child, and so ingenuous that deception with him was impossible. He could not tell a lie so you would not know it.

He served Beecher with a doglike loyalty, and an honesty beyond suspicion. They were associated fourteen years, traveled together over three hundred thousand miles, and Pond paid to Beecher two hundred forty thousand dollars.

* * * * *

Beecher and Tilton became acquainted about the year Eighteen Hundred Sixty. Beecher was at that time forty-seven years old; Tilton was twenty-five. The influence of the older man over the younger was very marked. Tilton became one of the most zealous workers in Plymouth Church: he attended every service, took part in the Wednesday evening prayer-meeting, helped take up the collection, and was a constant recruiting force. Tilton was a reporter, and later an editorial writer on different New York and Brooklyn dailies. Beecher's Sunday sermon supplied Tilton the cue for his next day's leader. And be it said to his honor, he usually gave due credit, and in various ways helped the cause of Plymouth Church by booming the reputation of its pastor.

Tilton was possessed of a deal of intellectual nervous force. His mind was receptive, active, versatile. His all-round newspaper experience had given him an education, and he could express himself acceptably on any theme. He wrote children's stories, threw off poetry in idle hours, penned essays, skimmed the surface of philosophy, and dived occasionally into theology. But his theology and his philosophy were strictly the goods put out by Beecher, distilled through the Tilton cosmos. He occasionally made addresses at social gatherings, and evolved into an orator whose reputation extended to Staten Island.

Beecher's big, boyish heart went out to this bright and intelligent young man—they were much in each other's company. People said they looked alike; although one was tall and slender and the other was inclined to be stout. Beecher wore his hair long, and now Tilton wore his long, too. Beecher affected a wide-brimmed slouch-hat; Tilton wore one of similar style, with brim a trifle wider. Beecher wore a large, blue cloak; Tilton wrapped himself 'round with a cloak one shade more ultramarine than Beecher's.

Tilton's wife was very much like Tilton—both were intellectual, nervous, artistic. They were so much alike that they give us a hint of what a hell this world would be if all mankind were made in one mold. But there was this difference between them: Mrs. Tilton was proud, while Tilton was vain. They were only civil toward each other because they had vowed they would be. They did not throw crockery, because to do so would have been bad form.

Beecher was a great joker—hilarious, laughing, and both witty and humorous. I was going to say he was wise, but that isn't the word. Tilton lacked wit—he never bubbled except as a matter of duty. Both Mr. and Mrs. Tilton greatly enjoyed the society of Beecher, for, besides being a great intellectual force, his presence was an antiseptic 'gainst jaundice and introspection. And Beecher loved them both, because they loved him, and because he loved everybody. They supplied him a foil for his wit, a receptacle for his overflow of spirit, a flint on which to strike his steel. Mrs. Tilton admired Beecher a little more than her husband did—she was a woman. Tilton was glad that his wife liked Beecher—it brought Beecher to his house; and if Beecher admired Tilton's wife—why, was not this a proof that Tilton and Beecher were alike? I guess so! Mrs. Tilton was musical, artistic, keen of brain, emotional, with all a fine-fibered woman's longings, hopes and ideals.

So matters went drifting on the tide, and the years went by, as the years will.

Mrs. Tilton became a semi-invalid, the kind that doctors now treat with hypophosphites, beef-iron-and-wine, cod-liver oil, and massage by the right attendant. They call it congenital anemia—a scarcity of the red corpuscle.

Some doctors there be who do not yet know that the emotions control the secretions, and a perfect circulation is a matter of mind. Anyway, what can the poor Galenite do in a case like this—his pills are powerless, his potions inane! Tilton knew that his wife loved Beecher, and he also fully realized that in this she was only carrying out a little of the doctrine of freedom that he taught, and that he claimed for himself. For a time Tilton was beautifully magnanimous. Occasionally Mrs. Tilton had spells of complete prostration, when she thought she was going to die. At such times her husband would send for Beecher to come and administer extreme unction.

Instead of dying, the woman would get well.

After one such attack, Tilton taunted his wife with her quick recovery. It was a taunt that pulled tight on the corners of his mouth; it was lacking in playfulness. Beecher was present at the bedside of the propped-up invalid. They turned on Tilton, did these two, and flayed him with their agile wit and ready tongues. Tilton protested they were wrong—he was not jealous—the idea!

But that afternoon he had his hair cut, and he discarded the slouch-hat for one with a stiff brim.

It took six months for his hair to grow to a length sufficient to indicate genius.

* * * * *

Beecher's great heart was wrung and stung by the tangle of events in which he finally found himself plunged. That his love for Mrs. Tilton was great there is no doubt, and for the wife with whom he had lived for over a score of years he had a profound pity and regard. She had not grown with him. Had she remained in Lawrenceburg, Indiana, and married a well-to-do grocer, all for her would have been well. Beecher belonged to the world, and this his wife never knew: she thought she owned him. To interest her and to make her shine before the world, certain literary productions were put out with her name as author, on request of Robert Bonner, but all this was a pathetic attempt by her husband to conceal the truth of her mediocrity. She spied upon him, watched his mail, turned his pockets, and did all the things no wife should do, lest perchance she be punished by finding her suspicions true. Wives and husbands must live by faith. The wife who is miserable until she makes her husband "confess all" is never happy afterwards. Beecher could not pour out his soul to his wife—he had to watch her mood and dole out to her the platitudes she could digest—never with her did he reach abandon. But the wife strove to do her duty—she was a good housekeeper, economical and industrious, and her very virtues proved a source of exasperation to her husband—he could not hate her.

It was Mrs. Beecher herself who first discovered the relationship existing between her husband and Mrs. Tilton. She accused her husband, and he made no denial—he offered her her liberty. But this she did not want. Beecher promised to break with Mrs. Tilton. They parted—parted forever in sweet sorrow.

And the next week they met again.

The greater the man before the public, the more he outpours himself, the more his need for mothering in the quiet of his home. All things are equalized, and with the strength of the sublime, spiritual nature goes the weakness of a child. Beecher was an undeveloped boy to the day of his death.

Beecher at one time had a great desire to stand square before the world. Major Pond, on Beecher's request, went to Mrs. Beecher and begged her to sue for a divorce. At the same time Tilton was asked to secure a divorce from his wife. When all parties were free, Beecher would marry Mrs. Tilton and face the world an honest man—nothing to hide—right out under the clear, blue sky, blown upon by the free winds of heaven!

This was his heart's desire.

But all negotiations failed. Mrs. Beecher would not give up her husband, and Tilton was too intent on revenge—and cash—to even consider the matter. Then came the crash.

* * * * *

Tilton sued Beecher for one hundred thousand dollars' damages for alienating his wife's affection. It took five months to try the case. The best legal talent in the land was engaged. The jury disagreed and the case was not tried again.

Had Mrs. Beecher applied for a divorce on statutory grounds, no court would have denied her prayer. In actions for divorce, guilt does not have to be proved—it is assumed. But when one man sues another for money damages, the rulings are drawn finer and matters must be proved. That is where Tilton failed in his lawsuit.

At the trial, Beecher perjured himself like a gentleman to protect Mrs. Tilton; Mrs. Tilton waived the truth for Beecher's benefit; and Mrs. Beecher swore black was white, because she did not want to lose her husband. Such a precious trinity of prevaricators is very seldom seen in a courtroom, a place where liars much do congregate. Judge and jury knew they lied and respected them the more, for down in the hearts of all men is a feeling that the love-affairs of a man and a woman are sacred themes, and a bulwark of lies to protect the holy of holies is ever justifiable.

Tilton was the one person who told the truth, and he was universally execrated for it. Love does not leave a person without reason. And there is something in the thought of money as payment to a man for a woman's love that is against nature.

Tilton lost the woman's love, and he would balm his lacerated heart with lucre! Money? God help us—a man should earn money. We sometimes hear of men who subsist on women's shame; but what shall we say of a man who would turn parasite and live in luxury on a woman's love—and this woman by him now spurned and scorned! The faults and frailties of men and women caught in the swirl of circumstances are not without excuse, but the cold plottings to punish them and the desire to thrive by their faults are hideous.

The worst about a double life is not its immorality—it is that the relationship makes a man a liar. The universe is not planned for duplicity—all the energy we have is needed in our business, and he who starts out on the pathway of untruth finds himself treading upon brambles and nettles which close behind him and make return impossible. The further he goes the worse the jungle of poison-oak and ivy, which at last circles him round in strangling embrace. He who escapes the clutch of a life of falsehood is as one in a million. Victor Hugo has pictured the situation when he tells of the man whose feet are caught in the bed of bird-lime. He attempts to jump out, but only sinks deeper—he flounders, calls for help, and puts forth all his strength. He is up to his knees—to his hips—his waist—his neck, and at last only hands are seen reaching up in mute appeal to heaven. But the heavens are as brass, and soon where there was once a man is only the dumb indifference of Nature.

The only safe course is the open road of truth. Lies once begun, pile up; and lies require lies to bolster them.

Mrs. Tilton had made a written confession to her husband, but this she repudiated in court, declaring it was given "in terrorem." Now she had only words of praise and vindication for Beecher.

Mrs. Beecher sat by her husband's side all through the long trial. For a man to leave the woman with whom he has lived a lifetime, and who is the mother of his children, is out of the question. What if she does lack intellect and spirituality! He has endured her; aye! he has even been happy with her at times—the relationship has been endurable—'twere imbecility, and death for both, to break it.

Beecher and his wife would stand together.

Mrs. Tilton's lips had been sanctified by love, and were sealed, though her heart did break.

The jury stood nine for Beecher and three against. Major Pond, the astute, construed this into a vindication—Beecher was not guilty!

The first lecture after the trial was given at Alexandria Bay. Pond had sold out for five hundred dollars. Beecher said it was rank robbery—no one would be there. The lecture was to be in the grove at three o'clock in the afternoon. In the forenoon, boats were seen coming from east and west and north—excursion-boats laden with pilgrims; sailboats, rowboats, skiffs, and even birch-bark canoes bearing red men. The people came also in carts and wagons, and on horseback. An audience of five thousand confronted the lecturer.

The man who had planned the affair had banked on his knowledge of humanity—the people wanted to see and hear the individual who had been whipped naked at the cart's tail, and who still lived to face the world smilingly, bravely, undauntedly.

Major Pond was paid the five hundred dollars as agreed. The enterprise had netted its manager over a thousand dollars—he was a rich man anyway—things had turned out as he had prophesied, and in the exuberance of his success he that night handed Mr. Beecher a check for two hundred fifty dollars, saying, "This is for you with my love—it is outside of any arrangement made with Major Pond." After they had retired to their rooms, Beecher handed the check to Pond, and said, as his blue eyes filled with tears, "Major, you know what to do with this?" And Major Pond said, "Yes."

Tilton went to Europe, leaving his family behind. But Major Pond made it his business to see that Mrs. Tilton wanted for nothing that money could buy. Beecher never saw Mrs. Tilton, to converse with her, again. She outlived him a dozen years. On her deathbed she confessed to her sister that her denials as to her relations with Beecher were untrue. "He loved me," she said; "he loved me, and I would have been less than woman had I not loved him. This love will be my passport to Paradise—God understands." And so she died.

* * * * *

Tilton was by nature an unsuccessful man. He was proudly aristocratic, lordly, dignified, jealous, mentally wiggling and spiritually jiggling. His career was like that of a race-horse which makes a record faster than he can ever attain again, and thus is forever barred from all slow-paced competitions. Tilton aspired to be a novelist, an essayist, a poet, an orator. His performances in each of these lines, unfortunately, were not bad enough to damn him; and his work done in fair weather was so much better than he could do in foul that he was caught by the undertow. And as for doing what Adirondack Murray did—get right down to hardpan and wash dishes in a dishpan—he couldn't do it. Like an Indian, he would starve before he would work—and he came near it, gaining a garret-living, teaching languages and doing hack literary work in Paris, where he went to escape the accumulation of contempt that came his way just after the great Beecher trial.

Before this, Tilton started out to star the country as a lecturer. He evidently thought he could climb to popularity over the wreck of Henry Ward Beecher. Even had he wrecked Beecher completely, it is very likely he would have gone down in the swirl, and become literary flotsam and jetsam just the same.

Tilton had failed to down his man, and men who are failures do not draw on the lecture platform. The auditor has failure enough at home, God knows! and what he wants when he lays down good money for a lecture-ticket is to annex himself to a success.

Tilton's lecture was called, "The Problem of Life"—a title which had the advantage of allowing the speaker to say anything he wished to say on any subject and still not violate the unities. I heard Tilton give this lecture twice, and it was given from start to finish in exactly the same way. It contained much learning—had flights of eloquence, bursts of bathos, puffs of pathos, but not a smile in the whole hour and a half. It was faultily faultless, icily regular, splendidly null, dead perfection—no more. It was so perfect that some people thought it great. The man was an actor and had what is called platform presence. He would walk on the stage, carrying his big, blue cloak over his arm, his slouch-hat in his hand—for he clung to these Beecher properties to the last, even claiming that Beecher was encroaching on his preserve in wearing them.

He would bow as stiffly and solemnly as a new-made judge. Then he would toss the cloak on a convenient sofa, place the big hat on top of it, and come down to the footlights, deliberately removing his yellow kid gloves. There was no introduction—he was the whole show and brooked no competition. He would begin talking as he removed the gloves; he would get one glove off and hold it in the other hand, seemingly lost in his speech. From time to time he would emphasize his remarks by beating the palm of his gloved hand with the loose glove. By the time the lecture was half over, both gloves would be lying on the table; unlike the performance of Sir Edwin Arnold, who, during his readings, always wore one white kid glove and carried its mate in the gloved hand from beginning to end.

Theodore Tilton's lectures were consummate art, done by a handsome, graceful and cultured man in a red necktie, but they did not carry enough caloric to make them go. They seemed to lack vibrations. Art without a message is for the people who love art for art's sake, and God does not care much for these, otherwise he would not have made so few of them.

* * * * *

Lyman Abbott sums up his estimate of the worth of his lifelong friend and literary associate, Henry Ward Beecher, in the following words:

"It was in the pulpit that Beecher was seen at his best. His mastery of the English tongue, his dramatic power, his instinctive art of impersonation, which had become a second nature, his vivid imagination, his breadth of intellectual view, the catholicity of his sympathies, his passionate enthusiasm, which made for the moment his immediate theme seem to him the one theme of transcendent importance, his quaint humor alternating with genuine pathos, and above all his simple and singularly unaffected devotional nature, made him as a preacher without a peer in his own time and country. His favorite theme was love: love to man was to him the fulfilment of all law; love of God was the essence of all Christianity. Retaining to the day of his death the forms and phrases of the New England theology in which he had been reared, he poured into them a new meaning and gave to them a new significance.

"He probably did more than any other man in America to lead the Puritan churches from a faith which regarded God as a moral governor, the Bible as a book of laws, and religion as obedience to a conscience, to a faith which regards God as a father, the Bible as a book of counsels, and religion as a life of liberty in love."

As a sample of Beecher's eloquence, this extract from his sermon on the death of Lincoln reveals his quality as well perhaps as anything he ever said:

The joy of the Nation came upon us suddenly, with such a surge as no words can describe. Men laughed, embraced one another, sang and prayed, and many could only weep for gladness.

In one short hour, joy had no pulse. The sorrow was so terrible that it stunned sensibility. The first feeling was the least, and men wanted to get strength to feel. Other griefs belong always to some one in chief, but this belonged to all. Men walked for hours as though a corpse lay in their houses. The city forgot to roar. Never did so many hearts in so brief a time touch two such boundless feelings. It was the uttermost of joy and the uttermost of sorrow—noon and midnight without a space between. We should not mourn, however, because the departure of the President was so sudden. When one is prepared to die, the suddenness of death is a blessing. They that are taken awake and watching, as the bridegroom dressed for the wedding, and not those who die in pain and stupor, are blessed. Neither should we mourn the manner of his death. The soldier prays that he may die by the shot of the enemy in the hour of victory, and it was meet that he should be joined in a common experience in death with the brave men to whom he had been joined in all his sympathy and life.

This blow was but the expiring rebellion. Epitomized in this foul act we find the whole nature and disposition of slavery. It is fit that its expiring blow should be such as to take away from men the last forbearance, the last pity, and fire the soul with invincible determination that the breeding system of such mischiefs and monsters shall be forever and utterly destroyed. We needed not that he should put on paper that he believed in slavery, who, with treason, with murder, with cruelty infernal, hovered round that majestic man to destroy his life. He was himself the lifelong sting with which Slavery struck at Liberty, and he carried the poison that belonged to Slavery; and as long as this Nation lasts it will never be forgotten that we have had one Martyr-President—never, never while time lasts, while heaven lasts, while hell rocks and groans, will it be forgotten that Slavery by its minions slew him, and in slaying him made manifest its whole nature and tendency. This blow was aimed at the life of the Government. Some murders there have been that admitted shades of palliation, but not such a one as this—without provocation, without reason, without temptation—sprung from the fury of a heart cankered to all that is pure and just.

The blow has failed of its object. The Government stands more solid today than any pyramid of Egypt. Men love liberty and hate slavery today more than ever before. How naturally, how easily, the Government passed into the hands of the new President, and I avow my belief that he will be found a man true to every instinct of liberty, true to the whole trust that is imposed in him, vigilant of the Constitution, careful of the laws, wise for liberty: in that he himself for his life long, has known what it is to suffer from the stings of slavery, and to prize liberty from the bitter experience of his own life. Even he that sleeps has by this event been clothed with new influence. His simple and weighty words will be gathered like those of Washington, and quoted by those who, were he alive, would refuse to listen. Men will receive a new access to patriotism. I swear you on the altar of his memory to be more faithful to that country for which he perished. We will, as we follow his hearse, swear a new hatred to that slavery against which he warred, and which in vanquishing him has made him a martyr and conqueror. I swear you by the memory of this martyr to hate slavery with an unabatable hatred, and to pursue it. We will admire the firmness of this man in justice, his inflexible conscience for the right, his gentleness and moderation of spirit, which not all the hate of party could turn to bitterness. And I swear you to follow his justice, his moderation, his mercy. How can I speak to that twilight million to whom his name was as the name of an angel of God, and whom God sent before them to lead them out of the house of bondage? O thou Shepherd of Israel, Thou that didst comfort Thy people of old, to Thy care we commit these helpless and long-wronged and grieved.

And now the martyr is moving in triumphal march, mightier than one alive. The Nation rises up at every stage of his coming; cities and States are his pall-bearers, and the cannon beat the hours in solemn progression; dead, dead, dead, he yet speaketh. Is Washington dead? Is Hampden dead? Is David?

Four years ago, O Illinois, we took from your midst an untried man from among the people. Behold! we return him to you a mighty conqueror; not thine any more, but the Nation's—not ours, but the world's. Give him place, O ye prairies! in the midst of this great continent shall rest a sacred treasure to myriads who shall pilgrim to that shrine to kindle anew their zeal and patriotism. Ye winds that move over mighty spaces of the West, chant his requiem! Ye people, behold the martyr whose blood, as so many articulate words, pleads for fidelity, for law, for Liberty!



WENDELL PHILLIPS

What worldwide benefactors these "imprudent" men are! How prudently most men creep into nameless graves; while now and then one or two forget themselves into immortality.

—Speech on Lovejoy



May the good Lord ever keep me from wishing to say the last word; and also from assigning ranks or awarding prizes to great men gone. However, it is a joy to get acquainted with a noble, splendid personality, and then introduce him to you, or at least draw the arras, so you can see him as he lived and worked or nobly failed.

And if you and I understand this man it is because we are much akin to him. The only relationship, after all, is the spiritual relationship. Your brother after the flesh may not be your brother at all; you may live in different worlds and call to each other in strange tongues across wide seas of misunderstandings. "Who is my mother and who are my brethren?"

As you understand a man, just in that degree are you related to him. There is a great joy in discovering kinship—for in that moment you discover yourself, and life consists in getting acquainted with yourself. We see ourselves mirrored in the soul of another—that is what love is, or pretty nearly so.

If you like what I write, it is because I express for you the things you already know; we are akin, our heads are in the same stratum—we are breathing the same atmosphere. To the degree that you comprehend the character of Wendell Phillips you are akin to him. I once thought great men were all ten feet high, but since I have met a few, both in astral form and in the flesh, I have found out differently.

What kind of a man was Wendell Phillips?

Very much like you and me, Blessed, very much like you and me.

I think well of great people, I think well of myself, and I think well of you. We are all God's children—all parts of the Whole—akin to Divinity.

Phillips never thought he was doing much—never took any great pride in past performances. When what you have done in the past looks large to you, you have not done much today. His hopes were so high that there crept into his life a tinge of disappointment—some have called it bitterness, but that is not the word—just a touch of sadness because he was unable to do more. This was a matter of temperament, perhaps, but it reveals the humanity as well as the divinity of the man. There is nothing worse than self-complacency—smugosity is sin.

Phillips was not supremely great—if he were, how could we comprehend him?

And now if you will open those folding doors—there! that will do—thank you.

* * * * *

When was he born? Ah, I'll tell you—it was in his twenty-fifth year—about three in the afternoon, by the clock, October Twenty-first, Eighteen Hundred Thirty-five. The day was Indian summer, warm and balmy. He sat there reading in the window of his office on Court Street, Boston, a spick-span new law-office, with four shelves of law-books bound in sheep, a green-covered table in the center, three armchairs, and on the wall a steel engraving of "Washington Crossing the Delaware."

He was a handsome fellow, was this Wendell Phillips—it would a' been worth your while just to run up the stairs and put your head in the door to look at him. "Can I do anything for you?" he would have asked.

"No, we just wanted to see you, that's all," we would have replied.

He sat there at the window, his long legs crossed, a copy of "Coke on Littleton" in his hands. His dress was what it should be—that of a gentleman—his face cleanly shaven, hair long, cut square and falling to his black stock. He was the only son of Boston's first Mayor, both to the manor and to the manner born, rich in his own right; proud, handsome, strong, gentle, refined, educated—a Christian gentleman, heir to the best that Boston had to give—a graduate of the Boston Latin School, of Harvard College, of the Harvard Law School—living with his widowed mother in a mansion on Beacon Hill, overlooking Boston's forty-three acres of Common!

Can you imagine anything more complete in way of endowment than all this? Did Destiny ever do more for mortal man?

There he sat waiting for clients. About this time he made the acquaintance of a cockeyed pulchritudinous youth, Ben Butler by name, who was errand-boy in a nearby office. It was a strange friendship—peppered by much cross-fire whenever they met in public—to endure loyal for a lifetime.

Clients are sure to come to the man who is not too anxious about them—sure to come to a man like Phillips—a youth clothed with the graces of a Greek—waiting on the threshold of manhood's morning.

Here is his career: a successful lawyer and leader in society; a member of the Legislature; a United States Senator, and then if he cares for it—well, well, well!

But in the meantime, there he sits, not with his feet in the window or on a chair—he is a gentleman, I said, a Boston gentleman—the flower of a gracile ancestry. In the lazy, hazy air is the hum of autumn birds and beetles—the hectic beauty of the dying year is over all. The hum seems to grow—it becomes a subdued roar.

You have sat behind the scenes waiting for the curtain to rise—a thousand people are there just out of your sight—five hundred of them are talking. It is one high-keyed, humming roar.

The roar of a mob is keyed lower—it is guttural and approaches a growl—it seems to come in waves, a brazen roar rising and falling—but a roar, full of menace, hate, deaf to reason, dead to appeal.

You have heard the roar of the mob in "Julius Caesar," and stay! once I heard the genuine article. It was in Eighty-four—goodness gracious, I am surely getting old!—it was in a town out West. I saw nothing but a pushing, crowding mass of men, and all I heard was that deep guttural roar of the beast. I could not make out what it was all about until I saw a man climbing a telegraph-pole.

He was carrying a rope in one hand. As he climbed higher, the roar subsided. The climber reached the arms that form the cross. He swung the rope over the crossbeam and paid it out until the end was clutched by the uplifted hands of those below.

The roar arose again like an angry sea, and I saw the figure of a human being leap twenty feet into the air and swing and swirl at the end of the rope.

The roar ceased.

The lawyer laid down the brand-new book, bound in sheep, and leaned out of the window—men were running down the thoroughfare, some hatless, and at Washington Street could be seen a black mass of human beings—beings who had forsaken their reason and merged their personality into a mob.

The young lawyer arose, put on his hat, locked his office, followed down the street. His tall and muscular form pushed its way through the mass.

Theodore Lyman, the Mayor, was standing on a barrel importuning the crowd to disperse. His voice was lost in the roar of the mob.

From down a stairway came a procession of women, thirty or so, walking by twos, very pale, but calm. The crowd gradually opened out on a stern order from some unknown person. The young lawyer threw himself against those who blocked the way. The women passed on, and the crowd closed in as water closes over a pebble dropped into the river.

The disappearance of the women seemed to heighten the confusion: there were stones thrown, sounds of breaking glass, a crash on the stairway, and down the narrow passage, with yells of triumph, came a crowd of men, half-dragging a prisoner, a rope around his waist, his arms pinioned. The man's face was white, his clothing disheveled and torn. His resistance was passive—no word of entreaty or explanation escaped his lips. A sudden jerk on the rope from the hundred hands that clutched it threw the man off his feet—he fell headlong, his face struck the stones of the pavement, and he was dragged for twenty yards. The crowd grabbed at him and lifted him to his feet—blood dripped from his face, his hat was gone, his coat, vest and shirt were in shreds. The man spoke no word.

"That's him—Garrison, the damned abolitionist!" The words arose above the din and surge of the mob: "Kill him! Hang him!"

Phillips saw the colonel of his militia regiment, and seizing him by the arm, said, "Order out the men to put down this riot!"

"Fool!" said the Colonel, "don't you see our men are in this crowd!"

"Then order them into columns, and we will protect this man."

"I never give orders unless I know they will be obeyed. Besides, this man Garrison is a rioter himself—he opposes the government."

"But, do we uphold mob-law—here, in Boston!"

"Don't blame me—I haven't anything to do with this business. I tell you, if this man Garrison had minded his own affairs, this scene would never have occurred."

"And those women?"

"Oh, they are members of the Anti-Slavery Society. It was their holding the meeting that made the trouble. The children followed them, hooting them through the streets!"

"Children?"

"Yes; you know children repeat what they hear at home—they echo the thoughts of their elders. The children hooted them, then some one threw a stone through a window. A crowd gathered, and here you are!"

The Colonel shook himself loose from the lawyer and followed the mob. The Mayor's counsel prevailed: "Give the prisoner to me—I will see that he is punished!"

And so he was dragged to the City Hall and there locked up.

The crowd lingered, then thinned out. The shouts grew less, and soon the police were able to rout the loiterers.

The young lawyer went back to his law-office, but not to study. The law looked different to him now—the whole legal aspect of things had changed in an hour.

It was a pivotal point.

He had heard much of the majesty of the law, and here he had seen the entire machinery of justice brushed aside.

Law! It is the thing we make with our hands and then fall down and worship. Men want to do things, so they do them, and afterward they legalize them, just as we believe things first and later hunt for reasons. Or we illegalize the thing we do not want others to do.

Boston, standing for law and order, will not even allow a few women to meet and discuss an economic proposition!

Abolition is a fool idea, but we must have free speech—that is what our Constitution is built upon! Law is supposed to protect free speech, even to voicing wrong ideas! Surely a man has a legal right to a wrong opinion! A mob in Boston to put down free speech!