e daily papers; his name glided
as often--this week from Chicago, next{14} week from Boston--over the
lightning wires, as the name of any other man, of whatever note. To no
man did the people more widely nor more earnestly say, _"Tell me thy
thought!"_ And, somehow or other, revolution seemed to follow in his
wake. His were not the mere words of eloquence which Kossuth speaks
of, that delight the ear and then pass away. No! They were _work_-able,
_do_-able words, that brought forth fruits in the revolution in
Illinois, and in the passage of the franchise resolutions by the
Assembly of New York.

And the secret of his power, what is it? He is a Representative American
man--a type of his countrymen. Naturalists tell us that a full grown man
is a resultant or representative of all animated nature on this globe;
beginning with the early embryo state, then representing the lowest
forms of organic life, [4] and passing through every subordinate grade
or type, until he reaches the last and highest--manhood. In like manner,
and to the fullest extent, has Frederick Douglass passed through every
gradation of rank comprised in our national make-up, and bears upon his
person and upon his soul every thing that is American. And he has not
only full sympathy with every thing American; his proclivity or bent,
to active toil and visible progress, are in the strictly national
direction, delighting to outstrip "all creation."

Nor have the natural gifts, already named as his, lost anything by his
severe training. When unexcited, his mental processes are probably slow,
but singularly clear in perception, and wide in vision, the unfailing
memory bringing up all the facts in their every aspect; incongruities
he lays hold of incontinently, and holds up on the edge of his keen and
telling wit. But this wit never descends to frivolity; it is rigidly
in the keeping of his truthful common sense, and always used in
illustration or proof of some point which could not so readily be
reached any other way. "Beware of a Yankee when he is feeding," is a
shaft that strikes home{15} in a matter never so laid bare by satire
before. "The Garrisonian views of disunion, if carried to a successful
issue, would only place the people of the north in the same relation
to American slavery which they now bear to the slavery of Cuba or the
Brazils," is a statement, in a few words, which contains the result and
the evidence of an argument which might cover pages, bu