Ottumwa weekly courier. (Ottumwa, Wapello County, Iowa) 1872-1899, 1877-12-26

was materially reinforced by many
of the cultured people from our,
Encighboring towns.
/ OF the lecture there is, Of course,
various opinions. 1t is conceded that
the Grafton, on Daniel O'Connell, the
Irish orator, was all that the subject
afforded. 1t is probable that nine
tcnths Of the persons who listened to
him, would say to-day that they
would have preferred to hear him on
some other subject. This admission,
while conccding the speakers fine
presence, great talents, and elegant
rhetoric, is of itself the severcst crit
ieism which the effort deserved. The
selection of the subject and its con-
tinued delivery for over twenty years,
igresistibly forces the conclusion up
on the mind that Wendell Phillips is
apotheosizing the Irish agitator,
O'Connell, to immortalizc the Amer
lean agitator. Wendell Phillips. For
Daniel O'Connell, after all, was only
an agitator of great natural eloquence,
but Of no practical wisdom or great
genius. He was instrumental in en-
abling the Irish people to change
their religious masters and that was
the substance of his achievements
If the abject, subserviency Of the
Irish people to the Catholic priest
hood, which was firmly established
by Daniel O'Connell, has tended to
better.and elevate the people of that
country, then is Daniel O'Connell
worthy to be Held up as pattern to
be initiated otherwise not. The pic
ture of the laws which our English
forefathers enacted three hundred
years ago, for the government of their
people, Irish as well as others, was
probably somewhat overdrawn;
still they were bad enough at the
best. But the intelligent listener
could not help rejecting that about
the same time, Mr.. Phillips New
England ancestors were engaged in
burning witches and other SINH
lar diversions. The weakest place
about the lecture and one that did
Mr.. Phillips appreciation of the in
telligence of his audience no credit,
was his repetition Of things which
were memorized and evidently proper
and appropriate when his lecture was
first written, but which are out of
place and untrue to-day. For in
stance the picture of the servility of
the press, which he represented as
cowardly and afraid to express itself
on the living issues of the day, was cv-
identity an idea twenty years old,
evolved alta time when pro-slavery
n,obs were pelting Phillips with
rotten eggs and throwing obnoxious
presses into the rivers. And even in
those times, when the press of both
sides was tcrrorized by slavery, such
editors rs Garrison, Smith, Greedy,
Birney and Lovejoy, spoke out as
plainly, and as strongly, and much
more reasonably and effactually than
did Wendell Phillips.
Its likely that the speaker estimat-
ed the character of the press of pro-
slavery days, by the standard of his
own home at Boston, where they new
er had any newspapers. AT anyrate
whatever there may have been of
political bulldozing, resting upon the
newspapers at the time he wrote his
lecture, has now happily passed away
with slavery, and to-day it may be
truthfully said of the press of Ameri-
ca, that it is rather ahead OF, than be-
. hind public sentiment on all political
questions.
Another objectionable anachron-
ism was the passage wherein
he attempted to compare
the want of homogeneity be-
tween the people of Great Britain and
those of this country. 1t was truth
full picture which he drew Of English
capitalists desiring to rush to the
relief of Turkey and her English
| avtss.S os.s ssssi lsssIs0 oy TIE nAnu VI
the Irishmen ready at all times to
take advantage Of the extremity of
the mother country. Doubtless there
| was time when the South, to have
saved slavery, and to have built up
| great Southern proslavery empire,
might have been considered as bear
ing the same relation to our govern
ment, that ireland now bears to
Great Britain, and therefore an ele-
ment of weakness, although that
fact never became manifest dur
ing the war of 1872 or the
Mexican war, the only opportunities
:hev have had. 1t is, however, our
opinion that now, SO far as foreign
interference is concerned, America
has the most united and homogeneous
people in the world. Hence, the elo-
quent orators finely drawn periods,
and brilliant theories about the ire
pressible and dangerous war of ideas
in this country, are abouttwenty years
out of date.
| The reputation Of Wendell Phillips
as an orator must forever rest upon
his heroic and unrelenting warfare
upon the sum of all villainies, human
slavery, and to have heard him at his
best, one must have listened to one of
his inyectiVes against that crime
| twenty years ago, when in his physical
and intellectual prime. And now
that the negro has become emancipat-
ed and enfranchised by the irreversi-
BILE logic of war, one becomes some
what painfully conscious of the fact
that, like Othello, Mr.. Phillips occu-
patton is gone.
The lecture was the sublimity of
easy, quiet, graceful, witty oratory,
brimming full of beautiful and orig
inal ideas, which enchanted the au
dience with wrapt attention from the
beginning to the end. If it had not
| many things in it worthy of criticism,
it would not be worthy of, or charac-
teristic Of the great New England
Orator.
The Star Lecture Course are entitled
TO the thanks of all our people for
their success in giving us an oppor-
tunity to hear such men. Besides
paying Mr.. Phillips 5000 the society
cleared about $40, which shows that
Ottumwa and Eeighboring people
are ready to pay for the best talent
when the best talent is offered them.
What You Can Get for $500.