He considered slavery
a great evil, and his mistake evidently consisted in supposing that a
great evil could exist in one part of the nation without vitiating the
whole of it.
[Illustration: WENDELL PHILLIPS. AS HE APPEARED BEFORE THE PHI BETA KAPPA.]
Phillips looked upon slavery as a crime, and attacked it in an
uncompromising manner. His speeches are not much like Webster's, but
they are excellent reading; full of keen, vivid thought, bright sayings,
and genial humor. He had the imagination of Demosthenes, but without the
logical faculty. Many of them possess historical value, and but for too
much _voix blanc_, like the brightness of new silver, might be
compared with Emerson's essays. Certain passages and individual
sentences are of rare beauty. Speaking of Lovejoy thirty years after his
death, he said, "How cautiously men sink into nameless graves, while now
and then one forgets himself into immortality." At the time of the Dred
Scott decision, he exclaimed: "Is Liberty dead? Is the valley of the
Mississippi her grave? Are the Rocky Mountains her monument; and shall
the Falls of Niagara chant forever her requiem?" In his Brooklyn address
of November 1st, 1859, the finest of his orations, and one which he must
have prepared with exceptional care, after telling the story of Tsar
Nicholas, who insisted on building a straight railroad from Moscow to
St.
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