The gentlemen all carried their hats in their
hands, out of respect for the duchess, who wore a sort of lace tiara;
but in this emergency Phillips, who had a speech to make at Birmingham
next evening, placed his on his head and continued to wear it. The
consequence was that when the duchess gave them a second entertainment
Phillips was not invited. He was as independent as this on all
occasions.
The anti-slavery movement carried along with it a variety of other
social and political movements such as spiritualism, total abstinence,
and the prevention of capital punishment; which prevented many
sympathetic friends of the cause from joining it, and gave it a quaint,
and sometimes even a comical aspect. These Utopian and impracticable
notions were accepted by the abolitionists partly on the log-rolling
principle, and partly from a tendency of those people to separate
themselves from what is real and tangible. It seems strange that a man
of Wendell Phillips' culture and mental endowments should not have been
able to distinguish between a necessary and possible reform, and those
vague theories of human happiness and perfection which are not based on
the logic of experience, but indicate rather a wayward mental condition
in the devotees. If a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, what should
be said of unripe and superficial thinking? We wonder what were Wendell
Phillips' reflections concerning the women in Bloomer costume, and the
paradoxical persons who frequented the anti-slavery fairs, and created
disturbances at the anti-slavery conventions.
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