Wendell Phillips, Theodore C. Pease, Speeches, Lectures and Letters of Wendell Phillips: Volume 1

Scientific men think that electricity did much to hasten the coming of limestone and coal, and the disappearance of poison gas. In our case, too, electricity,--by which I mean the Garrison party [loud laughter and applause],--flashing through and through and all over the lazy heavens, quickened our change also. But the growth will be a great deal quicker in time to come. [Loud applause.] One great evil of politics--one that almost outweighs the help it indirectly gives to education — is the chains it puts on able men. Those chains are much loosened now. Listen to Mr. Seward on the prairies! Notice how free and eloquent he has been since the Chicago Convention! And this change is not due to age. You know, I am apt to say, among other impertinent things, that you can always get the truth from an American statesman after he has turned seventy, or given up all hope of the Presidency. [Applause.] I should like a law that one third of our able men should be ineligible to that office; then every third man would tell us the truth. The last ten years of John Quincy Adams were the frankest of his life. In them, he poured out before the people the treason and indignation which formerly he had only written in his diary. And Josiah Quincy, the venerable, God bless him I has told us more truth since he was eighty, than he ever did before. [Applause.] They tell us that until this year they have not been able to survey Mount Washington; its iron centre warped the compass. Just so with our statesmen before they reach seventy, their survey of the state is ever false. That great central magnet at Washington deranges all their instruments.

Let me take the speeches of Mr. Seward as an illustration of American statesmen. I take him, because he is a live man, and a worthy sample. [Applause.] I agree with the, doctors' rule,--Medicamenta non agunt in cadaver, --“Dead bodies are no test of drugs.” But he is a fit