Part 16

"Society rests in all its transactions on the idea that a solemn promise, pledge, assertion, strengthens and assures the act.... The witness on the stand gives solemn promise to tell the truth; the officer about to assume place for one year, or ten, or for life, pledges his word and oath; the grantor in a deed binds himself for all time by record; churches, societies, universities, accept funds on pledge to appropriate them to certain purposes and no other.... No man ever denounced these pledges as unmanly.... The doctor's principle would unsettle society; and if one proposed to apply it to any cause but temperance, practical men would quietly put him aside as out of his head."

Phillips told this story concerning the pledge. A man about sixty came to sit beside him as he was travelling in a railway car. He had heard Phillips lecture on temperance the previous evening. "I am master of a ship," said he, "sailing out of New York, and have just returned from my fiftieth voyage across the Atlantic. About thirty years ago I was a sot, shipped, while dead drunk, as one of the crew, and was carried on board like a log. When I came to, the captain sent for me. He asked me, 'Do you remember your mother?' I told him she died before I could remember anything. 'Well,' said he, 'I am a Vermont man. When I was young I was crazy to go to sea. At last my mother consented I should seek my fortune in New York.'

"He told how she stood on one side the garden gate and he on the other, when, with his bundle on his arm, he was ready to walk to the next town. She said to him, 'My boy, I don't know anything about towns, and I never saw the sea; but they tell me those great towns are sinks of wickedness, and make thousands of drunkards. Now, promise me you'll never drink a drop of liquor.'

"He said, 'I laid my hand in hers and promised, as I looked into her eyes for the last time. She died soon after. I've been on every sea, and seen the worst kinds of life and men. They laughed at me as a milksop, and wanted to know if I was a coward; but when they offered me liquor, I saw my mother across the gate, and I never drank a drop. It has been my sheet-anchor. I owe all to that. Would you like to take that pledge?' said he."

He took it. "It has saved me," he said. "I have a fine ship, wife and children at home, and I have helped others."

Dr. Crosby favored license. Phillips said, "The statute books in forty States are filled with the abortions of thousands of license laws that were never executed, and most of them were never intended to be."

"No one supposes," said Phillips later, "that law can make men temperate.... But law can shut up those bars and dram-shops which facilitate and feed intemperance, which double our taxes, make our streets unsafe for men of feeble resolution, treble the peril to property and life, and make the masses tools in the hands of designing men to undermine and cripple law."

Phillips also worked untiringly for labor reform. He wrote to Mr. George J. Holyoake, in England, "There'll never be, I believe and trust, a class-party here, labor against capital, the lines are so indefinite, like dove's-neck colors. Three-fourths of our population are to some extent capitalists; and, again, all see that there is really, and ought always to be, alliance, not struggle, between them." Again he said, "Capital and labor are only the two arms of a pair of scissors,--useless when separate, and only safe when fastened together, cutting everything before them."

He urged fewer hours for labor, better wages, and united effort among workingmen. He said to them, "Why have you not carried your ends before? Because in ignorance and division you have let the other side have their own way. We are ruled by brains.... You want books and journals.... When men have wrongs to complain of they should go to the ballot-box and right them.... Men always lose half of what is gained by violence. What is gained by argument is gained forever."

In an address in 1872 he said to labor, "If you want power in this country, if you want to make yourselves felt, ... write on your banner, so that every political trimmer can read it, so that every politician, no matter how short-sighted he may be, can read it: 'We never forget! If you launch the arrow of sarcasm at labor, we never forget; if there is a division in Congress, and you throw your vote in the wrong scale, we never forget.'"

Mr. Phillips carried out his ideas of labor under his own roof. So kind and considerate was he to his servants, that his cook, who was his nurse in childhood, used to leave the door open into the kitchen, that she might hear him pass and repass. She said, "Bless him, there is more music in his footfall than in a cathedral organ!"

When she was too old for work, he placed her in a home of her own, and went to see her every Saturday, when possible, with many gifts for her comfort, till she died. He paid the best wages to servants of anybody in the neighborhood. "Good pay, good service," he used to say.

He was always generous. One day on the cars he met a woman thinly clad, a lecturer from the South, a niece of Jefferson Davis, as he afterwards learned. She had received five dollars for her work. Mr. Phillips said, "I don't want to give offence, but you know I preach that a woman is entitled to the same as a man if she does the same work. Now, my price is fifty or a hundred dollars; and, if you will let me divide it with you, I shall not have had any more than you, and the thing will be even."

The lady at first refused, but was persuaded to take it. When she reached home she found there were fifty dollars--all he had received for his lecture at Gloucester.

In 1870 Phillips accepted the nomination for the governorship of Massachusetts from the prohibition and the labor parties, though he said, and undoubtedly with truth, that he had no desire to be governor. He received over twenty thousand votes.

When blamed because he favored General Butler for governor, he replied that he did not know a man among all the candidates whom he would make a saint of. "The difficulty is," said he, with his natural love of humor, "saints do not come very often; and, when they do, it is the hardest thing in the world to get them into politics."

When Andrew Johnson was not impeached, as Phillips hoped he would be, he used to say, "Congress has deposed him without impeachment. 'Friend, I'll not shoot thee,' said the Quaker to the footpad, 'but I'll hold thy head in the water until thee drown thyself.' The Republican party has taken a leaf out of that scrupulous Christian's book."

Phillips was a Protectionist. In early life he was a free-trader, but changed his views. "Under free trade," he said, "our country would be wholly agricultural.... Should we lose our diversified occupations, we would suffer a great loss, though there might be a pecuniary gain.... If all the world were under one law, and every man raised to the level of the Sermon on the Mount, free trade would be so easy and charming! But while nations study only how to cripple their enemies,--that is, their neighbors,--and while each trader strives to cheat his customer, and strangle the firm on the other side of the street, we must not expect the millennium."

He smiled at the "shoals of college-boys, slenderly furnished with Greek and Latin, but steeped in marvellous and delightful ignorance of life and public affairs, filling the country with free-trade din."

Phillips pleaded the cause of the Irish in his wonderful lecture on Daniel O'Connell. He was also the friend and advocate of the Indian.

He opposed capital punishment, because he thought the old Testament law--about which scholars disagree--was no more binding upon us than scores of others given to the Jews about "abstaining from meats offered to idols, and from blood and from things strangled," etc. Once men were hanged in England for stealing a shilling. We are gradually learning that reform is what society needs--not revenge.

Mr. Phillips spoke on finance before the American Social Science Association. His plan was, says Austin: "Take from the national banks all right to issue bills; let the nation itself supply a currency ample for all public needs; reduce the rate of interest."

In the summer of 1880 Mr. Phillips and his wife spent some time at Princeton, Mass. He was then sixty-nine years old. He wrote a friend: "I laze and ride on horseback, exploring the drives.... The rest of the time I sleep. I weigh a hundred and seventy-five pounds, and don't feel as old as I am."

To another friend he wrote of the extreme stillness of the place: "A passer-by is an event. The only noise ever made is by the hens. The only thing that ever happens is when we miss the cat. But we always keep awake at the sunsets, they are splendid."

The next year, June 30, 1881, he was asked to give the address at Harvard College, on the Centennial Anniversary of the Phi Beta Kappa. His subject was "The Scholar in a Republic."

"It was," says Thomas Wentworth Higginson, "the tardy recognition of him by his own college and his own literary society, and proved to be, in some respects, the most remarkable effort of his life. He never seemed more at his ease, more colloquial and more extemporaneous; and he held an unwilling audience spellbound, while bating absolutely nothing of his radicalism."

He pleaded for the great reforms for which he had labored all his life. "The fathers," he said, "touched their highest level when, with stout-hearted and serene faith, they trusted God that it was safe to leave men with all the rights he gave them. Let us be worthy of their blood, and save this sheet-anchor of the race,--universal suffrage,--God's church, God's school, God's method of gently binding men into commonwealths in order that they may at last melt into brothers....

"These agitations are the opportunities and the means God offers us to refine the taste, mould the character, lift the purpose, and educate the moral sense of the masses, on whose intelligence and self-respect rests the State. God furnishes these texts. He gathers for us this audience, and only asks of our coward lips to preach the sermons....

"If in this critical battle for universal suffrage ... there be any weapon, which, once taken from the armory, will make victory certain, it will be, as it has been in art, literature, and society, summoning woman into the political arena.... The literary class, until half a dozen years, has taken note of this great uprising only to fling every obstacle in its way.

"The first glimpse we get of Saxon blood in history is that line of Tacitus in his 'Germany,' which reads, 'In all grave matters they consult their women.' Years hence, when robust Saxon sense has flung away Jewish superstition and Eastern prejudice, and put under its foot fastidious scholarship and squeamish fashion, some second Tacitus, from the Valley of the Mississippi, will answer to him of the Seven Hills, 'In all grave questions we consult our women.' ...

"To be as good as our fathers we must be better.... With serene faith they persevered. Let us rise to their level. Crush appetite and prohibit temptation if it rots great cities."

In the winter of 1882 he made his last lecture tour, when he was seventy-one. He had the same noble presence, the same exquisitely toned voice which began his speech as in ordinary conversation, the same calm self-poised manner, as in middle life. The eyes were blue and small, the smile sweet, the figure straight, the whole bearing one of perfect mastery of both self and audience. I have heard, "his attitude was a study for the sculptor--yet unconscious and natural," truly says Mr. Martyn. "The weight of the body was usually supported upon the left foot, with the right slightly advanced at an easy angle--an attitude of combined firmness and repose."

His speeches were never written out. He disliked writing, and thought it "a mild form of slavery--a man chained to an ink-pot." He said, "The chief thing I aim at is to master my subject. Then I earnestly try to get the audience to think as I do."

He once wrote a young man, who had asked him about public speaking: "I think practice with all kinds of audiences the best of teachers. Think out your subject carefully. Read all you can relative to the themes you touch. Fill your mind; and then talk simply and naturally. Forget altogether that you are to make a speech or are making one.... Remember to talk up to an audience, not down to it. The commonest audience can relish the best thing you can say if you say it properly. Be simple, be earnest."

"He faced his audience," says Curtis, "with a tranquil mien, and a beaming aspect that was never dimmed. He spoke, and in the measured cadence of his quiet voice there was intense feeling, but no declamation, no passionate appeal, no superficial and feigned emotion. It was simply colloquy--a gentleman conversing. Unconsciously and surely the ear and heart were charmed.

"How was it done? Ah! how did Mozart do it, how Raphael? The secret of the rose's sweetness, of the bird's ecstasy, of the sunset's glory--that is the secret of genius and of eloquence."

Phillips's habit in travelling was to carry a large shawl, which he always spread between the sheets of his bed in the various hotels, to prevent a cold; an example to other speakers. His supper before an address was usually, it is said, three raw eggs and a cup of tea.

Mr. Phillips had already moved his home from 26 Essex Street, in the spring of 1881, to No. 37 Common Street, not far away, as his home had to be torn down for the widening of the street. It was a severe trial to both, but it did not remain their earthly home for long.

Mr. Phillips made his last public address at the unveiling of Anne Whitney's statue of Harriet Martineau at the "Old South" Church, Boston, Dec. 26, 1883.

His wife was seriously ill through January, and he watched most devotedly by her bedside. On the 26th of the month he was taken ill with angina pectoris. He felt that the end was near. He said, "I have no fear of death. I have long foreseen it. My only regret is for poor Ann. I had hoped to close her eyes before mine were shut." To a friend who spoke to him of his always expressed belief in the divinity of Christ, though many of his friends were Unitarian, he said, quoting the words of an eminent Semitic scholar: "I find the whole history of humanity before him and after him points to him, and finds in him its centre and its solution. His whole conduct, his deeds, his words, have a supernatural character, being altogether inexplicable from human relations and human means. I feel that here there is something more than man."

"Then you have no doubt about a future life?" said the friend.

"I am as sure of it as I am that there will be a to-morrow," was the reply.

On Saturday evening, Feb. 2, 1884, at fifteen minutes past six, he closed his eyes calmly and quietly forever.

All Boston, all America, was moved at the death of the great leader--patrician born, yet the people's advocate. The funeral was held at eleven o'clock Wednesday, Feb. 6, at Hollis-street Church, and then the body was borne to Faneuil Hall, two colored companies forming a guard of honor.

There, where he had won his first fame in youth at the Lovejoy meeting, where he had stirred the whole land by his eloquence in the cause of the oppressed, it was fitting he should sleep at last.

The Irish National League of Boston sent a mound of flowers, three feet by four, with the word "Humanity" in the centre, in violets on a bed of carnations. The Irish-American Societies of Boston sent a harp four feet high of ivy leaves and japonicas, with the word "Ireland" in the centre. One of the harp strings was broken. Others sent a sheaf of ripened wheat, a crown of ivy and roses, and a wreath of laurel.

From one o'clock till four, thousands passed the form of their beloved dead; rich and poor, Irish and American, black and white, children and adults. One old colored woman, with tears flowing down her cheeks, said, "Our Wendell Philips has gone." Another said, "He was de bes' fren' we ever hed. We owes him a heap!"

Frederick Douglass looked on in sorrow. "I wanted to see this throng," he said, "and to see the hold that this man had upon the community. It is a wonderful tribute."

Thousands were unable to enter Faneuil Hall, and filled every available inch of space in the street, and windows and balconies of buildings. A vast crowd followed up State Street to Washington, up School to Tremont, to the old Granary burying-ground, where the body was laid in the family vault.

Mrs. Phillips died Saturday, April 24, 1886, two years after her husband. She had been closely confined to her home for the greater part of fifty years. "She lay as if asleep," says Francis J. Garrison, "with all the purity and guilelessness of her youthful face ripened into maturity. It seemed transfiguration."

The body of Wendell Phillips was carried with that of his wife to Milton, a beautiful suburb where they had often spent their summers; and both were buried in the same grave, side by side, in a lot which he had purchased a year or two before his death. A noble pine-tree stands near the spot. On a plain slab at the head of the grave are the words, "Ann and Wendell Phillips."

HENRY WARD BEECHER.

"The most brilliant and fertile pulpit-genius of the nineteenth century, and the most widely influential American of his time," says John Henry Barrows in his masterly life of Henry Ward Beecher. "To the sensitive heart of a woman, he added a lion-like courage, and a Miltonic loftiness of spirit. To the more than royal imagination of Jeremy Taylor, he added a zeal as warm as Whitefield's. In him the wit of Sydney Smith was combined with the common-sense of John Bunyan.

"In the annals of oratory his place is near that of Demosthenes. Among reformers he need fear no comparison with Wendell Phillips, John Bright, Mazzini, or Charles Sumner. In moral genius for statesmanship he was the brother of Abraham Lincoln; and, in the annals of the pulpit, he can only be mentioned with the greatest names,--Chrysostom, Bernard, Luther, Wesley, Chalmers, Spurgeon."

Dr. Mark Hopkins, in Edward W. Bok's "Memorial Volume," said of Henry Ward Beecher's forty years in Plymouth pulpit, "No such instance of prolonged, steady power at one point, in connection with other labors so extended and diversified, and magnificent in their results, has ever been known."

Dr. Thomas Armitage of the Fifth-avenue Baptist Church, New York, his life-long friend, gave Beecher "the first place among the preachers of the world to-day." Dr. Robert Collyer said, "To my mind, he was the greatest preacher on this planet.... Men will be his debtors for ages to come."

June 24, 1891, the statue of this great American leader, by John Quincy Adams Ward, was unveiled in front of Brooklyn City Hall. Three hundred children from Plymouth Church Sunday-school sang his favorite hymn,--

"Love divine, all love excelling,"

accompanied by the band of the Thirteenth Regiment.

Henry Ward Beecher, the son of the Rev. Lyman Beecher and Roxana Foote, was born in Litchfield, Conn., June 24, 1813. The father was an eloquent, fearless, great-hearted man, the son and grandson of a sturdy blacksmith; the mother a refined, dignified, intellectual, beautiful, and superior woman. Her family connections were of the best in New England. Her ancestor, James Foote, an English officer, aided Charles II. of England to hide himself in the Royal Oak which grew in a field of clover, and for this was knighted; the family coat-of-arms bearing an oak for its crest with a clover-leaf in its quarterings.

Roxana, the granddaughter of General Ward of Revolutionary fame, was remarkably well educated for the times. She was versed in literature and history, which she studied while she spun flax, tying her books to the distaff,--no wonder that her great son was an omniverous reader,--she wrote and spoke the French language fluently, drew with the pencil, and painted with the brush on ivory, sang and played on the guitar, and was an expert with her needle.

[Illustration: HENRY WARD BEECHER.]

After her marriage with Mr. Beecher, she opened a school for girls in their parish at East Hampton, Long Island, to eke out a living on their four hundred dollars salary. From here they were called in 1810, eleven years after their marriage, to the hilly, lonely town of Litchfield, Conn., bringing their six little children with them.

Henry Ward was the ninth child, the eighth then living.

So many cares and privations broke down the beautiful mother, who died when Henry was three years old.

A friend of the family writes: "She told her husband that her views and anticipations of heaven had been so great that she could hardly sustain it, and if they had been increased she should have been overwhelmed, and that her Saviour had constantly blessed her; that she had peace without one cloud, and that she had never during her sickness prayed for life. She dedicated her sons to God for missionaries, and said that her greatest desire was that her children might be trained up for God....

"She attempted to speak to her children; but she was extremely exhausted, and their cries and sobs were such that she could say but little. She told them that God could do more for them than she had done or could do, and that they must trust him."

After Lyman Beecher had prayed, "she fell into a sweet sleep from which she awoke in heaven. It is a moving scene to see eight little children weeping around the bed of a dying mother."

"They told us," says Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe, "at one time that she had been laid in the ground, at another that she had gone to heaven. Whereupon Henry, putting the two things together, resolved to dig through the ground and go to find her; for being discovered under sister Catherine's window one morning digging with great zeal and earnestness, she called to him to know what he was doing, and, lifting his curly head, with great simplicity he answered, 'Why, I am going to heaven to find ma!'"