ing towards the City Hall as fast as their feet could carry them; children were shouting at the top of their voices; and occasionally a woman would turn back, such was her curiosity. What did it signify?

His own curiosity prompted him to forsake his book, and to go out into the street. With hurried strides he wended his way towards the City Hall. There he saw a thousand men, clad in broadcloth and all the other paraphernalia of respectability, dragging a man with a rope around his waist.

"Who is that man?" he inquired.

"William Lloyd Garrison," was the reply of a bystander.

At once he looked upon the proceeding with indignation, and discerned a violation of the central right of the Saxon's idea of liberty.

He saw the mayor entreating the crowd to maintain order and the peace; but, from the lips of that cowered official, he heard no command of authority. The young lawyer was also a military gentleman, and held a commission in a Suffolk regiment. The colonel of that regiment happened to be standing near him.

"Colonel," said the younger officer, "why not call out the guards? Let us offer our services to the mayor."

In ten words the wiser officer taught his young friend more of the government of the United States than nineyears' study had taught him.

"You fool!" replied the latter, pointing to the crowd that surged and pressed before him, "don't you see that the regiment is in front of you?"

Then for the first time it flashed upon the mind of Wendell Phillips-it was he—that our government, with all its merits, in a critical hour when all the passions of men fling themselves against the law, has no reserve force, and that there is no tribunal to which one can appeal, but that at that moment, just so much of law-abiding, self-respecting, intelligent sense as there is in the mob, just so much government have we got, and no more.

Phillips had never thought of this before. He had read Greek and Roman and English history; he had by heart the classic eulogies of brave old men and martyrs: he had even dreamed that he had heard the same tone from the cuckoo lips of Edward Everett, and now he was taught his error.

Into his frenzied brain, thought darted with the speed of an arrow. Intelligence explained, interpreted, the scene before him. True to the old proverb, that "The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church," this spectacle of shameless outrage committed against a single, defenceless man, whose only crime was, that he had dared to speak out the unvoiced wrongs of the poorest and most abject beings in the form of man, went home to the heart of Phillips, and stirred his Puritanic blood to the very finger-tips.

Perhaps he could not help it; for, if ever a man was a born fighter, Phillips was that man: and his instincts led him to take up with the weaker side from an innate conviction, that, in such a world as this, ninety-nine times out of a hundred, the right is on the side of the minority. In making up his decision as to what he would do, or where he would stand, the question of power, or wealth, or numbers, never entered into the mind of Phillips.

The young man of twenty-four, with a great, proud family, with a social position higher than that to which most young men attain at twenty-four, with ambition and hope and truth as his safeguards, then and there vowed that he would cast his lot with the anti-slavery people. To this end he had now learned his first lesson: he had become convinced of the righteousness of their cause.

One word more before we close this chapter.

On the twentieth anniversary of the Boston mob, Mr. Phillips delivered a speech in Stacy Hall, Boston, in which he reviewed that terrible event in language profoundly impressive. Whoever fails to read it will ignore one of the finest and most eloquent productions of the modern school of oratory.

CHAPTER V.

THE DÉBUT OF WENDELL PHILLIPS.

The Year 1837.- Slavery the Dominant Power of the Country. — Earnestness of the Abolitionists. - The Lovejoy Tragedy. -Story of the Alton Riots. The Tidings reach Boston. - Faneuil Hall refused to the Indignant Abolitionists. - Dr. Channing appeals to the Citizens of Boston. - The Hall opened at Last.-A Packed Audience. - Resolutions, Harangue of Attorney-Gen. Austin. -Its Effect. Reply of Wendell Phillips. -Great Uproar and Excitement.

The Result.

"Men blame us for the bitterness of our language and the personality of our attacks. It results from our position. The great mass of the people can never be made to stay and argue a long question. They must be made to feel it, through the hides of their idols."

"Give me any thing that walks erect, and can read, and he shall count one in the millions of the Lord's sacramental host, which is yet to come up, and trample all oppression in the dust. The weeds poured forth in nature's lavish luxuriance, give them but time, and their tiny roots shall rend asunder the foundations of palaces, and crumble the Pyramids to the earth."-PHILLIPS.

T was the year 1837,—a year which marks the dawn

IT

ing of one of the most momentous periods in the history of the American people. Martin Van Buren had been elected to the presidency; and his constituents, the Democratic party, had also secured a decisive majority in the Twenty-fifth Congress. No Congress that preceded was more subservient to the demands. of the slave-power. It voted not only to silence the

voice of the people, but its own voice as well. It struck down the sacred right of the people to petition for the redress of their grievances, by clamor, menace, and resolution, destroyed the freedom of debate, and hushed the voice of the representatives of the nation.

But although the administration thus begun was unhesitatingly subservient to the demands of the slavepower, and the slave-power itself was far-reaching, the uprising against slavery was not so slight as not to give cause for alarm. Two features of the early stages of this uprising were peculiarly striking and suggestive. There was the manifest failure of those early pioneers "to comprehend the magnitude and inveteracy of the evil to be removed, or the tremendous grasp in which it held the nation in its every department of individual and associated life." There was, too, an enthusiastic but unwarranted confidence in a speedy triumph. Evidences abound. They are seen in the proceedings of anti-slavery conventions and anniversaries, in the antislavery reports, speeches, and journals of those days. Even Mr. Garrison, whose abilities and opportunities of judging were certainly not small, shared largely in these illusions of hope, and in this evident under-estimate of the greatness and severity of the contest on which they had entered. Though much be conceded to the charm of novelty, the enthusiasm of youth, and the pardonable confidence of the neophyte, unhackneyed as yet, and without the lessons gained in the