NOT every orator of the first rank is entitled to be classed among men of action. Yet not a few of the makers of history have owed their power to the gift of inspiring speech. With some the

secret of their moving eloquence is simply the glow of intense earnestness, which always gives to the plainest utterances that contagion of enthusiasm which thrills the multitude into action. With

others, success (which is not necessarily power) lies in gilding with the glitter of cultured art their natural fluency in saying the proper thing at the proper time with reasonable force and grace. In all cases a larger share of the orator's influence than is generally supplied is due to the preceding circumstances and the occasion. Given an exciting issue and an eager throng, immense effects may be realized by the unadorned words of an authoritative speaker. A very ordinary match has kindled many a memorable fire, and favorable conditions enable mediocrity to score successes often unattainable by genius less well started.

But there have been, and there may still exist, orators whose distinction is that their high natural gifts, trained up to the topmost pitch of legitimate art, have been inspired

into activity by strong convictions upon some momentous matter of public right or wrong, and of this type Wendell Phillips stands a most illustrious example. The great slavery question had reached an acute stage when his talents and ardent temperament were yearning for a worthy vent. His tastes, his endowments and surroundings all conspired to make him a representative of the conservative culture of Boston, but his Puritan principles, overmastering these, made him a hearty devotee of the Abolition cause.

Wendell Phillips was born in Boston, of the best New England stock, on November 29, 1811. After graduating at Harvard, he was called to the bar in 1834. He espoused the cause of the anti-slavery party in the year following, yet remained comparatively quiet for two years. Then, in December, 1837, a meeting was held in Faneuil Hall to protest against the murder of Rev. E. P. Lovejoy for publishing an Abolition paper in Illinois. Phillips made an unpremeditated speech in reply to the State Attorney-General, who argued in opposition to the purpose of the meeting. The young lawyer's effort stirred the whole community. He had definitely cast his lot with the despised and hated Abolitionists. In 1840 he was chosen to represent Massachusetts at the World's Anti-slavery Conference in London, where he made himself conspicuous, not only by his oratorical powers, but as a champion of the right of women to be admitted to the conference on equal terms. His advocacy of Abolition was fearless in times of grave peril. He opposed every proposal that savored of compromise. With Phillips the Abolition movement was a religion, and no half-and-half measures were to be tolerated. "We do not play politics; anti-slavery is no half-jest with us; it is a terrible earnest, with life or death, worse than life or death on the issue." After opposing and denouncing the Constitution as an engine of the slave-power, he eagerly seized the opportunity to urge the Government to turn the war for the Union into a war for the destruction of slavery. William Lloyd Garrison, after encountering hostility and personal violence, wished to withdraw from the work of the AntiSlavery Society on emancipation being effected after the close of the war; but Wendell Phillips considered it to be his duty

to sustain the cause until the negro was admitted to full citizenship. Garrison did withdraw, but Phillips continued his championship of the Afro-American people, and acted as president of the Society until 1870.

The lecture platform was in its palmy day when Phillips devoted himself to the lecturing profession. From first to last he gave his services gratuitously to the cause so near his heart. After the abolition of slavery by Constitutional amendment, other reform movements enlisted his practical sympathy, such as those of liquor-prohibition, woman-suffrage, and the rights of labor. He delighted to set forth the benefits of agitation as the modern method of effecting political reforms, and he declared that he had taken Daniel O'Cannell as his model in his own work of agitation. He was an unsuccessful candidate under the banner of the Labor party for the governorship of Massachusetts.

His later years, after his great work was done, were largely given to efforts in aid of minor movements in which he achieved only moderate success. His literary and neutral orations and lectures sustain his reputation as the most charming public speaker of his time. He died on February 2, 1884, leaving, besides sundry fugitive and controversial publications, a goodly volume of Speeches, Lectures and Letters.

Professor C. F. Richardson thus states the qualifications of Wendell Phillips as an orator: "He was by nature and by art an orator, even more than a reformer. To speak was his life-work. As Horace Greeley said, Phillips made men think it was easy to be an orator. He did not put the form before the spirit; he was no mere rhetorician, hunting for a cause whereon to display his eloquence, but he would have spoken gracefully and strongly upon any question which aroused his interest. So, indeed, he did. His intellectual equipment and, to a certain extent, his tastes were academic; like Sumner, he was fond of classical themes and allusions, and, when occasion demanded, he could take pleasure in mere external finish. Well read in ancient and modern literature, a master in the use of invective and epigram, possessed of wit, which both Garrison and Sumner lacked, he charmed the cultivated and impressed the ignorant. A winsome personal presence, and a

serene, undisturbed manner, added to the attractiveness of his words, and enabled him to speak before great audiences of enemies."

THE ELOQUENCE OF O'CONNELL.

I do not think I exaggerate when I say that never, since God made Demosthenes, has he made a man better fitted for a great work than He did when He made O'Connell. Webster could address a bench of judges; Everett could charm a college; Choate could delude a jury; Clay could magnetize a senate; and Tom Corwin could hold the mob in his right hand; but no one of these men could do more than this one thing. The wonder about O'Connell was that he could outtalk Corwin, he could charm a college better than Everett, and leave Henry Clay himself far behind in magnetizing a

senate.

When I was in Naples, I asked Sir Thomas Fowell Buxton: "Is Daniel O'Connell an honest man?" "As honest a man as ever breathed," said he; and then he told me the following story: "When, in 1830, O'Connell first entered Parliament, the anti-slavery cause was so weak that it had only Lushington and myself to speak for it; and we agreed that, when he spoke, I should cheer him up, and when I spoke, he should cheer me; and these were the only cheers we ever got. O'Connell came into Parliament with one Irish member to support him. A large party of members went to him, saying: 'O'Connell, at last you are in the House with one helper-if you will never go down to Freemasons' Hall with Buxton and Brougham, here are twenty-seven votes for you on every Irish question. If you work with those abolitionists, count us always against you.'" It was a terrible temptation. How many a so-called statesman would have yielded! O'Connell said: "Gentlemen, God knows I speak for the saddest people the sun sees; but may my right hand forget its cunning, and my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth, if, to help Ireland-even Ireland-I forget the negro one single hour."

And then, besides his irreproachable character, he had— what is half the power of a popular orator-he had a majestic presence. A little O'Connell would have been no O'Connell

at all. You remember the story that Russell Lowell tells of Webster, when we in Massachusetts were about to break up the Whig Party. Webster came home to Faneuil Hall to protest, and four thousand Whigs came out to meet him. He lifted up his majestic presence before that sea of human faces, his brow charged with thunder, and said: "Gentlemen, I am a Whig; a Massachusetts Whig; a Revolutionary Whig; a Constitutional Whig; a Faneuil Hall Whig; and if you break up the Whig Party, where am I to go?" "And," says Lowell, "we all held our breath, thinking where he could go." "But," says Lowell, "if he had been five feet three, we should have said, 'Confound you, who do you suppose cares where you go?" Well, O'Connell had all that, and then he had, what Webster never had, and what Clay had, the magnetism and grace that melt a million souls into his. When I saw him he was sixty-five; lithe as a boy; his every attitude was beauty; his every gesture, grace. Macready or Booth never equalled him.

And then he had, what so few American speakers have, a voice that sounded the gamut. I heard him once, in Exeter Hall, say: "Americans, I send my voice careering, like the thunder-storm, across the Atlantic, to tell South Carolina that God's thunderbolts are hot, and to remind the negro that the dawn of his redemption is drawing near;" and I seemed to hear his voice reverberating and re-echoing back to London from the Rocky Mountains. And then, with the slightest possible flavor of an Irish brogue, he would tell a story that would make all Exeter Hall laugh; and, the next moment, there were tears in his voice, like an old song, and five thousand men would be in tears. And, all the while, no effort-he seemed only breathing.-WENDELL PHILLIPS.