here were cries
of: "Treason!" "Put him out!" Phillips simply smiled and waited for the
frenzy to subside. The speaker who has aroused his hearers into a tumult
of either dissent or approbation has won--and Phillips did both. He
spoke for thirty minutes and finished in a whirlwind of applause. The
Attorney-General had disappeared, and those of his followers who
remained were strangely silent. The resolutions were passed in a shout
of acclamation.

The fame of Wendell Phillips as an orator was made. Father Taylor once
said, "If Emerson goes to hell, he will start emigration in that
direction." And from the day of that first Faneuil Hall speech Wendell
Phillips gradually caused Abolitionism in New England to become
respectable.

* * * * *

Phillips was twenty-seven years old when he gave that first, great
speech, and for just twenty-seven years he continued to speak on the
subject of slavery. He was an agitator--he was a man who divided men. He
supplied courage to the weak, arguments to the many, and sent a chill of
hate and fear through the hearts of the enemy. And just here is a good
place to say that your radical--your fire-eater, agitator, and
revolutionary who dips his pen in aqua fortis, and punctuates with
blood--is almost without exception, met socially, a very gentle, modest
and suave individual. William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips, Horace
Greeley, Fred. Douglas, George William Curtis, and even John Brown, were
all men with low, musical voices and modest ways--men who would not
tread on an insect nor harm a toad.

When the fight had been won--the Emancipation Proclamation issued--there
were still other fights ahead. The habit of Phillips' life had become
fixed.

He and Ann lived in that plain little home on Exeter Street, and to this
home of love he constantly turned for rest and inspiration.

At the close of the War he found his fortune much impaired, and he
looked to the Lyceum Stage--the one thing for which he was so eminently
fitted.

It was about the year Eighteen Hundred Eighty that a callow interviewer
asked him who his closest associates were. The answer was: "My
colleagues are hackmen and hotel-clerks; and I also know every
conductor, brakeman and engineer on every railroad in America. My home
is in the caboose, and my business is establishing trains."

I heard Wendell Phillips speak but once. I was about twelve years of
age, and my father and I had ridden t