Until we saw the chains
      Which bound our brothers’ lives,
    And heard the groans and felt the pains,
      Which come from wearing gyves.

      To brave heroic men
      The false no more was true;
    And what the Nation needed then
      Could any soldier do.

* * * * *

VII.

WENDELL PHILLIPS

(BORN 1811—­DIED 1884.)

THE TIMES WHEN HE APPEARED—­“WHO IS THIS FELLOW?”—­A FLAMING ADVOCATE OF LIBERTY—­LIBERTY OF SPEECH AND THOUGHT—­POWER TO DISCERN THE RIGHT—­THE MOB-BEATEN HERO TRIUMPHANT.

Long chapters of history are illumined as by as electric light in the following characteristic address from his pulpit by Henry Ward Beecher, at the time the name of the great philanthropist was added to the roll of American heroes.

THE TIMES WHEN HE APPEARED.

The condition of the public mind throughout the North at the time I came to the consciousness of public affairs and was studying my profession may be described, in one word, as the condition of imprisoned moral sense.  All men, almost, agreed with all men that slavery was wrong; but what can we do?  The compromises of our fathers include us and bind us to fidelity to the agreements that had been made in the formation of our Constitution.  Our confederation first, and our Constitution after.  These were regarded everywhere as moral obligations by men that hated slavery.  “The compromises of the Constitution must be respected,” said the priest in the pulpit, said the politician in the field, said the statesmen in public halls; and men abroad, in England especially, could not understand what was the reason of the hesitancy of President Lincoln and of the people, when they had risen to arms, in declaring at once the end for which arms were taken and armies gathered to be the emancipation of the slaves.  There never has been an instance in which, I think, the feelings and the moral sense of so large a number of people have been held in check for reasons of fidelity to obligations assumed in their behalf.  There never has been in history another instance more notable, and I am bound to say, with all its faults and weaknesses, more noble.  The commercial question—­that being the underlying moral element—­the commercial question of the North very soon became, on the subject of slavery, what the industrial and political question of the South had made it.  It corrupted the manufacturer and the merchant.  Throughout the whole North every man that could make any thing regarded the South as his legal, lawful market; for the South did not manufacture; it had the cheap and vulgar husbandry of slavery.  They could make more money with cotton than with corn, or beef, or pork, or leather, or hats, or wooden-ware; and Northern ships went South to take their forest timbers,