Beecher, will have
earned the right to lift the old flag back to its place on Fort Sumter,
for without these speeches England might have recognized the
Confederacy, and then there might have been no flag to raise."

Long time has passed since that Friday morning in the capital, and now
all men recognize the justice of the words of the martyred President.
History is a stern judge, and the centuries have given opportunity for
contrast. When a great country, a great emergency, a critical hour, and
a great man meet, a spark is struck out, called great eloquence. Such a
conjunction of city, peril and man once met in Athens, and for
twenty-four centuries boys have been translating Demosthenes' oration
against Philip. Demosthenes spoke, but Philip marched on. Greece bowed
her neck to the yoke, and became subject to Macedonia; Demosthenes
failed. Another crisis came in Westminster Hall, in London, when Edmund
Burke made his plea for the millions of outraged folk in India pillaged
by Warren Hastings. But Hastings became a lord; he died honoured in his
palace; India was left to stagger onward; Burke's splendid oratory
failed. That was a great hour in the history of eloquence when Patrick
Henry and Fisher Ames and Josiah Quincy became voices for liberty and
the new republic. But these orators spoke to sympathetic hearers, and
simply returned to the multitude in a flood what they had received from
the people in dew and rain.

Henry Ward Beecher spoke to mobs, pleaded with unfriendly critics, and
was asked to change hate to love, ice to fire, weapons for attack into
weapons for defense. He went against the English mob as one goes up
against a castle that is locked, barred and bristling with arms, and he
gave sops to Cerberus, charmed the keys out of him who kept the fortress
gate, cast a spell upon those who guarded the walls, stole all the
weapons, and, single handed, at last lifted the banner of victory above
the ramparts of granite. The history of eloquence holds no other
achievement of the same rank and class. What a volume, that contains the
speech delivered within the limit of nine days, with the introduction at
Manchester, the three great arguments at Glasgow, Edinburgh and
Liverpool, and the peroration in Exeter Hall, London! What physical
reserves as the basis of sustained public speech! What mastery of all
the facts of liberty and democracy, not less than slavery! What
familiarity with English law not less than American!