The addresses of Phillips and Curtis may well be contrasted as unusually fine specimens of the higher discussion and controversy which is much more common than rigid debate. In No. I the means should be examined by which a conservative audience was led to delighted acceptance of sentiments from which on second thought it shrank. I. WENDELL PHILLIPS. The Scholar in a Republic.1 Address at the Centennial Anniversary of the ["Wendell Phillips received an invitation to deliver the Centennial Phi Beta Kappa oration in the summer of 1881. 'When I knew that Wendell Phillips was to give the Phi Beta Kappa oration at Cambridge, I was very curious to know what course he 5 would take. I said, 'He has two opportunities, neither of which he has ever had before. He has always spoken to the people. Now he is invited to address scholars. He has an opportunity to show, that, when he chooses to do it, he can be the peer of Everett or Sumner on their own platform of high culture. He can leave behind personalities, forget 10 for the hour his hatreds and enmities, and meet all his old opponents peacefully, in the still air of delightful studies. This is an opportunity he has never had before, and probably will never have again.' 'But there is another and different opportunity now offered him. Now, for the first and only time, he will have face to face before him 15 the representatives of that Cambridge culture which has had little sympathy with his past labors. He can tell them how backward they were in the old Anti-Slavery contest, and how reluctant to take part in any later reforms. If he has been bitter before, he can be ten times as bitHe can make this the day of judgment for the sins of half 20 a century. This opportunity, also, is unique. It will never come again. Can he resist this temptation, or not?' ter now. 'It never occurred to me that he would accept and use both opportunities, but he did so. He gave an oration of great power and beauty, full of strong thoughts and happy illustrations, not unworthy of any uni25 versity platform or academic scholar. It was nearly, though not wholly, free from personalities; but it was also one long rebuke for the recreant scholarship of Cambridge. Rev. J. F. Clarke. Quoted pp. 342-343 of G. L. Austin's Life of Wendell Phillips. 1 999 Reprinted by permission of Lee & Shepard from Speeches, Lectures and Letters, Wendell Phillips. Second Series, pp. 331-363. He had never seemed more at his ease, more colloquial, more thoroughly extemporaneous, than in his address in later life before the Phi Beta Kappa Society in Cambridge; yet it had all been sent to the Boston daily papers in advance and appeared with scarcely a word's variation, except where he had been compelled to omit some passages 5 for want of time. That was, in some respects, the most remarkable effort of his life; it was a tardy recognition of him by his own college and his own literary society; and he held an unwilling audience spellbound, while bating absolutely nothing of his radicalism. Many a respectable lawyer or divine felt his blood run cold, the next day, when 10 he found that the fascinating orator whom he had applauded to the echo had really made the assassination of an emperor seem as trivial as the doom of a mosquito." Contemporaries, T. W. Higginson, p. 270.] MR. PRESIDENT AND BROTHERS OF THE P. B. K.: A hundred years ago our society was planted a slip from the 15 older root in Virginia. The parent seed, tradition says, was French, part of that conspiracy for free speech whose leaders prated democracy in the salons, while they carefully held on to the flesh-pots of society by crouching low to kings and their mistresses, and whose final object of assault was 20 Christianity itself. Voltaire gave the watchword, — No matter how much or how little truth there may be in the tradition: no matter what was the origin or what was the 25 object of our society, if it had any special one, both are long since forgotten. We stand now simply a representative of free, brave, American scholarship. I emphasize American scholarship. In one of those glowing, and as yet unequalled pictures 30 which Everett drew for us, here and elsewhere, of Revolutionary scenes, I remember his saying, that the independence we then won, if taken in its literal and narrow sense, was of no interest and little value; but, construed in the fulness of its real meaning, it bound us to a distinctive American char- 35 acter and purpose, to a keen sense of large responsibility, and to a generous self-devotion. It is under the shadow of |