In retrospect, historians make a large place for the eloquence of the anti-slavery epoch, as a force explaining the abolition movement. Every great movement must have its advocate and voice. Garrison was the pen for abolition, Emerson its philosopher, Greeley its editor, and in Wendell Phillips abolition had its advocate. Political kings are oftentimes artificial kings. The orator is God's natural king, divinely enthroned. Back of all eloquence is a great soul, a great cause and a great peril. Our history holds three supreme moments in the story of eloquence--the hour of Patrick Henry's speech at Williamsburg, Wendell Phillips' at Faneuil Hall and Lincoln's at Gettysburg. The great hour and the great crisis, the great cause and the great man, all met and melted together at a psychologic moment. In retrospect Phillips seems like a special gift of God to the anti-slavery period. Webster had more weight and majesty, Everett a higher polish, Douglas more pathos, Beecher was more of an embodied thunder-storm, but John Bright was probably right when he pronounced Wendell Phillips one of the first orators of his century, or of any century. The man back of Wendell Phillips and the abolition movement was William Lloyd Garrison. This reformer began his career in 1825, as a practical printer and occasional writer of articles for the daily press. Among Garrison's friends were two Quakers, one a young farmer, John Greenleaf Whittier; the other was Benjamin Lundy, who for several years had spent his time and fortune protesting against the slave traffic. Lundy had visited Hayti, to examine the conditions of negro life there,--had returned to Baltimore, where he had been brutally beaten by a slave dealer, and had finally come to Boston to test out the anti-slavery sentiment in New England. He held a meeting in a Baptist church, only to have it broken up by the pastor, who refused to allow Lundy to continue his remarks, on the ground that his position could only be offensive to the South, and therefore dangerous. But Lundy succeeded in having a committee appointed to consider the problem, and young Garrison was one of its members. A few months later, Garrison was made the editor of a journal in Bedford, where he began to advance more and more radical theories, until a rival editor was irritated to the point of charging him with "the pert loquacity of a blue jay." But Garrison's fidelity to his own convictions, and his courage in airing them in public, had won the respect of the Quaker enthusiast, Lundy, and the old man walked all the way from Baltimore to Bedford to ask Garrison to join him in his work of agitation. A year later the two men, one old and discouraged, the other young and hopeful, both being practically penniless,--started work in Baltimore. Troubles came thick and fast. The slave dealer who had beaten Lundy now attacked young Garrison. Carelessly worded criticisms of a Northern slave dealer from Garrison's own town of