Then, of the new instrumentalities for agitation and reform, the free Platform derives largely its popularity and efficiency from his genius. Consider the freedom of speech it invites and maintains, free as the freest can make it, a stand whereon every one who will gains a hearing; every opinion its widest scope of entertainment,--the widest hospitality consistent with the decorum of debate. Hither comes any one breathing a sentiment of progress, any daring to dissent against dissent, against progress itself. Here the sexes meet on fair terms. Here, as not elsewhere, is intimated, if not spoken fittingly, the popular spirit and tendency. Here come the most effective speakers by preference to address a free constituency, a constituency to be theirs, if not already, their words leaping into type from their lips, to be spread forthwith to the four winds by the reporting press. 'Tis a school of debate, for oratory, for thought, for practice; has the remarkable merit of freshness, originality; questions affecting the public welfare being here anticipated, first deliberated upon by the people themselves; systems of agitation organized and set on foot for creating a wholesome popular sentiment; in short, for giving inspiration, a culture, to the country, which the universities cannot; training the reason and moral sense by direct dealing with principles and persons as occasion requires; a school from whence have graduated not a few of our popular speakers,--the Orator himself, whose speeches furnish passages for collegiate declamation, from which politicians plume their rhetoric to win a borrowed fame. Cato said, "An orator was a good man skilled in the art of speaking." More than any lecturer, unless it be Emerson, he has made the lecture a New-England, if not an American institution; is always heard with profit and pleasure by the unprejudiced auditor,--any course in the cities and towns being thought incomplete without his. Nor is it easy to estimate the debt of the free States to his speeches before associations, conventions, in pulpits, the humblest places where his words could be secured. He has already taken his place beside Garrison, has linked his name with the Liberator's, to be on men's lips while the word _slave_ has significance. If there be any one to whom the country is more largely indebted than another for eminent services in his day, it must be Garrison; unless a doubt may arise in the minds of some, if the hero of Harper's Ferry be not entitled to like honors, since to these illustrious men must be attributed the merit of having struck the most effective blows for the overthrow of slavery, the one inaugurating the era of emancipation, and the other consummating it. "The just man's like a rock, that turns the wroth Of all the raging waters into a froth."