ABSTRACT
In the death of Wendell Phillips, the great American orator and patriot, the world loses another link between its past and its present struggles. Wendell-Phillips, who died at his house in Boston, U.S., on February 2nd, may be described of the original abolitionists. When in the prime of youth, with a splendid future which his splendid oratorical powers were opening out before him, he did not hesitate to throw in his lot with the unpopular and ridiculed movement for the abolition of slavery. He was still at the Law School at Harvard when, on New Year's Day, 1832, Garrison and eleven other friends formed the New England Anti-Slavery Society. Afterwards the Boston mob broke up the Women's Anti-Slavery Meeting, and Garrison himself was, with difficulty, rescued from their hands. It was soon after this that Wendell-Phillips threw in his fortunes with the unpopular movement, and made his first great anti-slavery speech in Old Faneuil Hall, in December, 1837. His impassioned address bore down all opposition, and from this moment he was the recognised champion and spokesman of the movement, and he never shrank from its advocacy, though followed from street to street of his native city by howling mobs. He was true and faithful to his principles, no matter what they cost him. In 1839 he gave up his practice at the bar on the ground that the attorney's oath, which he had taken, bound him to respect the Constitution of the United States, which sanctioned slavery. During five-and-twenty years of the severest social and political contest which this century has seen, he was always in the front of the battle, and during the civil war, he was specially active, always urging forward emancipation. After the close of the war he opposed the dissolution of the American Anti-Slavery Society, and became Its President, till it was finally dissolved in 1870.
