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Wendell Phillips, Theodore C. Pease, Speeches, Lectures and Letters of Wendell Phillips: Volume 1, Mobs and education. (search)
ds which have been brought to the block, by the eloquent ruins of nations, they conjure us not to quench the light that is rising on the world. Greece cries to us by the convulsed lips of her poisoned, dying Demosthenes, and Rome pleads with us in the mute persuasion of her mangled Tully. Let us listen to the grave and weighty words of the nephew of Charles James Fox, Lord Holland, in his protest when British Tories tried to stop the discussion of Catholic Emancipation,--words of which Macaulay says, They state a chief article of the political creed of the Whigs with singular clearness, brevity, and force. We are, Lord Holland says, well aware that the privileges of the people, the rights of free discussion, and the spirit and letter of our popular institutions, must render--and they are intended to render--the continuance of an extensive grievance, and of the dissatisfaction consequent thereupon, dangerous to the tranquillity of the country, and ultimately subversive of the a
Wendell Phillips, Theodore C. Pease, Speeches, Lectures and Letters of Wendell Phillips: Volume 1, chapter 19 (search)
this individual agony into four nulions; multiply that into centuries; and that into all the relations of father and child, husband and wife; heap on all the deep, moral degradation, both of the oppressor and the oppressed, and tell me if Waterloo or Thermopylae can claim one tear from the eye even of the tenderest spirit of mercy, compared with this daily system of hell amid the most civilized and Christian people on the face of the earth! Since I said this, ten years ago, I find that Macaulay makes the same comparison between a short civil war and long despotism,--putting into Milton's mouth the following: For civil war, that it is an evil I dispute not. But that it is the greatest of evils, that I stoutly deny. It doth indeed appear to the misjudging to be a worse calamity than bad government, because its miseries are collected together within a short space and time, and may easily, at one view, be taken in and perceived. But the misfortunes of nations ruled by tyrants, being
Wendell Phillips, Theodore C. Pease, Speeches, Lectures and Letters of Wendell Phillips: Volume 1, chapter 24 (search)
me fait l'ouverture partout, said one,--This man makes an opening everywhere, --hence his soldiers named him L'Ouverture, the opening. This was the work of seven years. Let us pause a moment, and find something to measure him by. You remember Macaulay says, comparing Cromwell with Napoleon, that Cromwell showed the greater military genius, if we consider that he never saw an army till he was forty; while Napoleon was educated from a boy in the best military schools in Europe. Cromwell manufactured his own army; Napoleon at the age of twenty-seven was placed at the head of the best troops Europe ever saw. They were both successful; but, says Macaulay, with such disadvantages, the Englishman showed the greater genius. Whether you allow the inference or not, you will at least grant that it is a fair mode of measurement. Apply it to Toussaint. Cromwell never saw an army till he was forty; this man never saw a soldier till he was fifty. Cromwell manufactured his own army-out of what
Wendell Phillips, Theodore C. Pease, Speeches, Lectures and Letters of Wendell Phillips: Volume 1, chapter 25 (search)
ouse, though wishing to do so, because the Executive informed them that he had no means to protect the State's property against the grog-shops of the peninsula. Macaulay says, speaking of James the Second's disturbed reign: On such occasions, it will ever be found that the human vermin, which, neglected by ministers of state and iefs of Police said, Give me thirty men, and an order, and I will quell that mob at once. The difficulty was not that it could not be quelled. That class which Macaulay describes never faces the law until it has bribed it. The moment the court turns its determined countenance upon them, they retire to cellars and garrets again. Metropolitan Police, which kept him and his allies, conspirators, from carrying the Empire State into the hands of the Confederacy. These are the times when, as Macaulay says, The vermin burrowing in garrets and cellars show themselves of terrible importance. Who knows that such times may not come upon us? I have seen the day
Wendell Phillips, Theodore C. Pease, Speeches, Lectures and Letters of Wendell Phillips: Volume 2, The pulpit (1860). (search)
en and bigotry. That lesson I learned of my father long before boyhood ceased. I could never see any essential difference between the one portentious Roman Pope and the thousand petty ones who ape him in our pulpits. In the fervor of the Reformation, men dreamed they were getting rid of the claim to infallibility and the right to excommunicate. But the Protestant Church, in consequence of the original sin of its constitution, soon lapsed into the same dogmatism and despotism. Indeed, Macaulay does not seem to believe that there ever was any real intent in the Reformers to surrender these prerogatives. The scheme was, he says, merely to rob the Babylonian enchantress of her ornaments, to transfer the cup of her sorceries to other hands, spilling as little as possible by the way. But I quite agree with the last speaker who occupied this desk, Mr. Sanborn of Concord, when he intimated the eminent utility, perhaps necessity, of a pastor in the full sense of that term. The many ne
Wendell Phillips, Theodore C. Pease, Speeches, Lectures and Letters of Wendell Phillips: Volume 2, The scholar in a republic (1881). (search)
s later the last professor who went to quicken and lift the moral mood of those halls is found advising a plain, blunt, honest witness to forge and lie, that this scholarly reputation might be saved from wreck. Singular comment on Landor's sneer, that there is a spice of the scoundrel in most of our literary men. But no exacting level of property qualification for a vote would have saved those stains. In those cases Judas did not come from the unlearned class. Grown gray over history, Macaulay prophesied twenty years ago that soon in these States the poor, worse than another inroad of Goths and Vandals, would begin a general plunder of the rich. It is enough to say that our national funds sell as well in Europe as English consols; and the universal-suffrage Union can borrow money as cheaply as Great Britain, ruled, one half by Tories, and the other half by men not certain that they dare call themselves Whigs. Some men affected to scoff at democracy as no sound basis for nationa
Wendell Phillips, Theodore C. Pease, Speeches, Lectures and Letters of Wendell Phillips: Volume 2, Daniel O'Connell (1875.) (search)
Webster and Clay and the staff of Whig statesmen told the people that the truth floated farther on the shouts of the mob than the most eloquent lips could carry it. But law-abiding, Protestant, educated America could not be held back. Neither Whig chiefs nor respectable journals could keep these people quiet. Go to England. When the Reform Bill of 1831 was thrown out from the House of Lords, the people were tumultuous; and Melbourne and Grey, Russell and Brougham, Lansdowne, Holland, and Macaulay, the Whig chiefs, cried out, Don't violate the law: you help the Tories! Riots put back the bill. But quiet, sober John Bull, law-abiding, could not do without it. Birmingham was three days in the hands of a mob; castles were burned; Wellington ordered the Scotch Greys to rough-grind their swords as at Waterloo. This was the Whig aristocracy of England. O'Connell had neither office nor title. Behind him were three million people steeped in utter wretchedness, sore with the oppression
Mary Thacher Higginson, Thomas Wentworth Higginson: the story of his life, IX: the Atlantic Essays (search)
r tribute to the value of this essay came to the author in a letter from a thoughtful friend, who said, I think it was one of the influences that opened Michigan University to women, and has now invited a woman professor on the same terms as men. The anonymousness of the Atlantic essays caused some amusing mistakes, as when Mrs. C. H. Dall was many times congratulated on having written Mademoiselle and her Campaigns. Finally she discovered the author, and wrote to him that no one except Macaulay could have written a better magazine article, and his would have been half lies. Mr. Higginson himself wrote to Harriet Prescott: . . . I had more [letters] about April Days than about anything I have written—sick women, young farmers, etc. One odd anonymous person, signing Su Su, sent me a root of double bloodroot postmarked Snow's Store, Vt. It seemed pretty that bloodroot should come out of Snow's Store— though I suppose the donor never thought of it. I have a piece almost re
Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Henry Walcott Boynton, Reader's History of American Literature, Chapter 5: the New England period — Preliminary (search)
literary and commercial Boston of his day. At a time when almost all New England authors came from Harvard College, he stepped into the arena with only the merchants' powerful guild behind him. He was said to have modeled his style upon that of Macaulay, then a popular idol, and was also said to have been complimented by Macaulay himself. His memory was great, his reading constant, his acquaintance large, his perceptions ready and clear. What he wrote was so pithy, so candid, so neat, that yoMacaulay himself. His memory was great, his reading constant, his acquaintance large, his perceptions ready and clear. What he wrote was so pithy, so candid, so neat, that you felt for the moment as if it were the final word. It was only on the second reading that you became conscious of a certain limitation; the thought never went very deep, there was no wide outlook, no ideal atmosphere. While, therefore, his work had a considerable and wholesome influence upon his immediate audience, and was well worth doing, it cannot be considered as a strong original contribution to American letters. Women who wrote. The same disappearance of secondary figures applied
Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Henry Walcott Boynton, Reader's History of American Literature, A Glossary of Important Contributors to American Literature (search)
eply to Hayne. A collection of his Works appeared in 1851, and of his Private correspondence in 1856. Died in Marshfield, Mass., Oct. 24, 1852. Whipple, Edwin Percy Born in Gloucester, Mass., March 8, 1819. At the age of fourteen, he published articles in the Salem newspapers, and soon became superintendent of the news-room of the Merchants' Exchange, Boston. Eventually he gave up journalism to devote himself entirely to literature. He became known as a critic from his article on Macaulay, which appeared in the Boston Miscellany (1843); and the same year he began to lecture. He was literary editor of the Boston Globe, 1872-73. Among his publications are Essays and reviews (2 vols., 1848-49); selected lectures entitled Literature and life (1849) ; Character and characteristics of men (1866) ; The literature of the age of Elizabeth (1869) ; and Success and its conditions (1871). He also edited with James T. Fields the Family Library of British poetry (1878). There were issu
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