When it became known that Wendell Phillips, the most promising of
Boston's young sons, had turned Abolitionist, Beacon Hill rent its
clothes and put ashes on its head.

On the question of slavery, the first families of the North stood with
the first families of the South--the rights of property were involved,
as well as the question of caste.

Let one of the scions of Wall Street avow himself an anarchist and the
outcry of horror would not be greater than it was when young Phillips
openly declared himself an Abolitionist. His immediate family were in
tears; the relatives said they were disgraced; cousins cut him dead on
the street, and his name was stricken from the list of "invited guests."
The social-column editors ignored him, and worst of all, his clients
fled.

The biographers are too intensely partisan to believe, literally; and
when one says, "He left a large and lucrative practise that he might
devote himself," etc., we'd better reach for the Syracuse product.

Wendell Phillips never had a large and lucrative practise, and if he
had, he would not have left it. His little law business was the kind
that all fledglings get--the kind that big lawyers do not want, and so
they pass it over to the boys. Doctors are always turning pauper
patients over to the youngsters, and so in successful law-offices there
is more or less of this semi-charitable work to do. Business houses also
have fag-end work that they give to beginners, as kind folks give bones
to Fido. Wendell Phillips' law-work was exactly of this contingent
kind--big business and big fees only go to big men and tried.

Law is a business, and lawyers who succeed are businessmen. Social
distinction has its pull in all professions and all arts, and the man
who can afford to affront society and hope to succeed is as one in a
million.

Lawyers and businessmen were not so troubled about Wendell Phillips'
inward beliefs as they were in the fact that he was a fool--he had flung
away his chances of getting on in the world. They ceased to send him
business--he had no work--no callers--folks he used to know were now
strangely nearsighted.

Phillips didn't quit the practise of law, any more than he withdrew from
society--both law and society quit him. And then he made a virtue of
necessity and boldly resigned his commission as a lawyer--he would not
longer be bound to protect the Constitution that upheld the right of a
slave-owner to capture his "property" in Massa