he had never heard. At once the cry from the unsatisfied audience was “Beecher, Beecher!” So unexpected was the call, and so annoyed was he at being called out, that it required almost physical force to get him to take the platform; but when once there his soul kindled with the occasion. A simple recital of facts led the audience step by step over the ground which had been traversed for the last ten years. The grand principles of our polity were uncovered to their view. Scene after scene was depicted by his marvellous dramatic power, culminating in that outrage in the Senate Chamber on account of which they had gathered; and the audience, alternately moved by his pathos, fired by his passion, or swept by his humor, became one with the speaker. They saw as he saw, they felt as he felt; and he stamped them that night with the impress of his hatred of slavery and his burning enthusiasm for liberty. The next day the press carried this impression to the multitude of its readers, and, dismissing the other speeches of the evening with a formal notice, gave his as nearly as possible verbatim. It was his meeting for the first time upon the platform with the leading men of the country, and from that hour he took his place with them and held it to the end. Many leading men in Massachusetts having been invited to a similar meeting held in Boston, and sending regrets, he analyzes their excuses in a Star Paper upon “Hearts and no Hearts”: “Admirable! The man is sacrificed to the position. No tear, no indignation, no heart-felt throb, no voice or gesture which befits an open and free heart. All instincts and spontaneity must be judged by supposed interests of a professorship. In such cases as this the man is a mere Jonah in the whale’s belly. His professorship has swallowed his manhood! Alas for the whale!” Of this attack on Sumner he said in the Star article of June 12, “Silence must be Nationalized”: “This deed stands absolutely alone in our history. It has not a single fellow! There have been brutal things, and cruel things, and mean things, and cowardly things, and wicked and inhuman wrongs, but nothing before that epitomized them all. With the exception of one or two papers, the whole South has accepted the act and made it representative! It is no longer Brooks that struck Sumner! He was the arm, but the whole South was the body! And with one consent it is declared that for the crime of _free speech_ it was done and deserved!”