to fossil conservatism and the thirst of gain, the spark will pass.  The resistance to slavery in this country has been a fruitful nursery of orators.  The natural connection by which it drew to itself a train of moral reforms, and the slight yet sufficient party organization it offered, reinforced the city with new blood from the woods and mountains.  Wild men, John Baptists, Hermit Peters, John Knoxes, utter the savage sentiment of Nature in the heart of commercial capitals.  They send us every year some piece of aboriginal strength, some tough oak-stick of a man who is not to be silenced or insulted or intimidated by a mob, because he is more mob than they,—­one who mobs the mob,—­some sturdy countryman, on whom neither money, nor politeness, nor hard words, nor eggs, nor blows, nor brickbats, make any impression.  He is fit to meet the bar-room wits and bullies; he is a wit and a bully himself, and something more; he is a graduate of the plough, and the stub-hoe, and the bush-whacker; knows all the secrets of swamp and snow-bank, and has nothing to learn of labor or poverty or the rough of farming.  His hard head went through in childhood the drill of Calvinism, with text and mortification, so that he stands in the New England assembly a purer bit of New England than any, and flings his sarcasms right and left.  He has not only the documents in his pocket to answer all cavils and to prove all his positions, but he has the eternal reason in his head.  This man scornfully renounces your civil organizations,—­county, or city, or governor, or army,—­is his own navy and artillery, judge and jury, legislature and executive.  He has learned his lessons in a bitter school.  Yet, if the pupil be of a texture to bear it, the best university that can be recommended to a man of ideas is the gauntlet of the mobs.

He who will train himself to mastery in this science of persuasion must lay the emphasis of education, not on popular arts, but on character and insight.  Let him see that his speech is not differenced from action; that, when he has spoken, he has not done nothing, nor done wrong, but has cleared his own skirts, has engaged himself to wholesome exertion.  Let him look on opposition as opportunity.  He cannot be defeated or put down.  There is a principle of resurrection in him, an immortality of purpose.  Men are averse and hostile, to give value to their suffrages.  It is not the people that are in fault for not being convinced, but he that cannot convince them.  He should mould them, armed as he is with the reason and love which are also the core of their nature.  He is not to neutralize their opposition, but he is to convert them into fiery apostles and publishers of the same wisdom.