But perhaps the eloquent tributes paid to his memory, in the Halls of Congress, helped the Cause no less. They at least brought back to the public mind the old and abhorrent tyrannies of the Southern Slave power; how it had sought not not only to destroy freedom of Action, but freedom of Speech, and hesitated not to destroy human Life with these; reminded the Loyal People of the Union of much that was hateful, from which they had escaped; and strengthened the purpose of Patriots to fix in the chief corner-stone of the Constitution, imperishable muniments of human Liberty. Lovejoy's brother had been murdered at Alton, Illinois, while vindicating freedom of Speech and of the Press; and the blood of that martyr truly became "the seed of the Church." Arnold--recalling a speech of Owen Lovejoy's at Chicago, and a passage in it, descriptive of the martyrdom,--said to the House, on this sad occasion: "I remember that, after describing the scene of that death, in words--which stirred every heart, he said he went a pilgrim to his brother's grave, and, kneeling upon the sod beneath which sleeps that brother, he swore, by the everlasting God, eternal hostility to African Slavery." And, continued Arnold, "Well and nobly has he kept that oath." Washburne, too, reminded the House of the memorable episode in that very Hall when, (April 5, 1860), the adherents of Slavery crowding around Lovejoy with fierce imprecations and threats, seeking then and there to prevent Free Speech, "he displayed that undaunted courage and matchless bearing which extorted the admiration of even his most deadly foes." "His"--continued the same speaker--"was the eloquence of Mirabeau, which in the Tiers Etat and in the National Assembly made to totter the throne of France; it was the eloquence of Danton, who made all France to tremble from his tempestuous utterances in the National Convention. Like those apostles of the French Revolution, his eloquence could stir from the lowest depths all the passions of Man; but unlike them, he was as good and as pure as he was eloquent and brave, a noble minded Christian man, a lover of the whole human Race, and of universal Liberty regulated by Law." Grinnell, in his turn, told also with real pathos, of his having recently seen Lovejoy in the chamber of sickness. "When," said Grinnell, "I expressed fears for his recovery, I saw the tears course down his manly cheek, as he said 'Ah! God's will be done, but I have been laboring, voting, and praying for twenty years that I might see the great day of Freedom which is so near and which I hope God will let me live to rejoice in. I want a vote on my Bill for the destruction of Slavery, root and branch.'"