The Home Journal

What Did Wendell Phillips Mean?

[From the Albany Argus.]

At his recent lecture here, Wendell Phillips declared that the President (if no opponent of the designs of the Radicals in affairs of government) "was an obstacle to be removed!" This was striking a keynote higher than the more prudent of his Jacobinical set have ventured upon publicly, and yet, culpable as is the idea suggested in every sense, and far beyond the sphere of political argument or denunciation, customary as is extravagance in that direction among us, there were those in his audience who applauded it. To say that they who applauded a sentiment which logically means revolution or assassination were of the shallow-minded or unreflecting class—those who thoughtlessly gave way to the peroration of the orator, unmindful of the meaning of his words, or those whose political animosities assume the shame of recklessness to all else but their gratification—is perhaps the most charitable explanation of the applause which followed the atrocity he uttered. Thank God, there were those present, whose perceptive faculties were not slumbering and whose mental capacities were active enough to take in the whole force and scope of his suggestions—and who shuddered at the thought of the anarchy and confusion which would follow in case some monomaniac like old John Brown with the idea that the President "must be removed" planted in his mind—and fired by the stimulus of the oratorical frame work in which it was held up to him, should act on it! These expressed their dissent, but it is said that the tide of thoughtlessness ran too high for them, and many a Democrat and conservative (attracted by curiosity) in the hall, wondered at the political inconsistency which dungeons "copperheads," and leaves to really dangerous men like Phillips the largest liberty and "freedom of speech?"