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

[531] Gina [sensation],--a traveller might journey through half the North, and if he neither spoke nor read English, he would never dream there was a war in any part of the nation,--an untouched North, while the South, mustering all her white men and all her sympathizers the world over, has not yet reached the garnered treasure of Northern strength. We have not yet put forth the first beginning of our power. In Scripture phrase, “Truly there has been a hiding of our power.” If we fail, it will be because we deserve to, because we have not virtue enough to prefer the end to the means. There is no question but of the conscience and intelligence of the North. Now, I believe in that, because thus far the government has never asked for anything, nor ventured anything, that the readiness of the people has not both given and indorsed. There is my ground of hope.

I do not believe in Southern exhaustion. There may be starving men at the South, starving households, ill-clad soldiers, but there is no such exhaustion as approaches despair. The South has not yet begun to play her last card. The moment she feels exhaustion she will proclaim liberty to the negro. The moment her cause touches its downfall in the judgment of its leaders, she will call the black into her ranks,--call him by some proclamation of gradual emancipation, which will gather to her side the heartiest sympathy of the English aristocracy. England never was an antislavery nation. Her ruling classes never accepted emancipation on any basis. England herself never accepted immediate abolition on any basis. As O'Connell well said, the scheme of immediate emancipation was carried over Parliament by the conscience of the middle classes, and they do not usually rule in England. To-day, that party in the contest which offers England gradual emancipation will offer her all that her judgment approves. Before the South permits her flag to stagger, she will