The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 75, January, 1864: A Magazine of Literature, Art, and PoliticsVarious
History
The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 75, January, 1864: A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics
Various
American periodicals
After a few months' absence he returns to America, having finished a
more remarkable embassy than any envoy who has represented us in Europe
since Franklin pleaded the cause of the young Republic at the Court of
Versailles. He kissed no royal hand, he talked with no courtly
diplomatists, he was the guest of no titled legislator, he had no
official existence. But through the heart of the people he reached
nobles, ministers, courtiers, the throne itself. He whom the "Times"
attacks, he whom "Punch" caricatures, is a power in the land. We may be
very sure, that, if an American is the aim of their pensioned garroters
and hired vitriol-throwers, he is an object of fear as well as of
hatred, and that the assault proves his ability as well as his love of
freedom and zeal for the nation to which he belongs.
Mr. Beecher's European story is a short one in time, but a long one in
events. He went out a lamb, a tired clergyman in need of travel; and as
such he did not strive nor cry, nor did any man hear his voice in the
streets. But in the den of lions where his pathway led him he remembered
hid own lion's nature, and uttered his voice to such effect that its
echoes in the great vaulted caverns of London and Liverpool are still
reaching us, as the sound of the woodman's axe is heard long after the
stroke is seen, as the light of the star shines upon us many days after
its departure from the source of radiance.
Mr. Beecher made a single speech in Great Britain, but it was delivered
piecemeal in different places. Its exordium was uttered on the ninth of
October at Manchester, and its peroration was pronounced on the
twentieth of the same month in Exeter Hall. He has himself furnished us
an analysis of the train of representations and arguments of which this
protracted and many-jointed oration was made up. At Manchester he
attempted to give a history of that series of political movements,
extending through half a century, the logical and inevitable end of
which was open conflict between the two opposing forces of Freedom and
Slavery. At Glasgow his discourse seems to have been almost
unpremeditated. A meeting of one or two Temperance advocates, who had
come to greet him as a brother in their cause, took on, "quite
accidentally," a political character, and Mr. Beecher gratified the
assembly with an address which really looks as if it had been in great
measure called forth by the pressure of the moment. It seems more like a
conversation than a set harangue. First, he very good-humoredly defines
his position on the Temperance question, and then naturally slides into
some self-revelations, which we who know him accept as the simple
expression of the man's character. This plain speaking made him at home
among strangers more immediately, perhaps, than anything else he could
have told them. "I am born without moral fear. I have expressed my views
in any audience, and it never cost me a struggle. I never could help
doing it."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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