Press enter after choosing selection

Wendell Phillips On The Saxons

Wendell Phillips On The Saxons image
Parent Issue
Day
19
Month
December
Year
1873
Copyright
Public Domain
OCR Text

In a lecture in Boston on Monday evening, Wendell Phillips is reported to hare said : " It does not suit our Saxon men to use their muscles. The genuine Yan kee disdains work ; he makes his brains work for him. This is not the age o work we make our brains do the work o 20,000 hands. We work through invention, through sagacity. We stand to-day in Boston and laboriously lay a wire to San Francisco 5,000 miles awa-y, and with one man at each end of the wire we send a message, and think it a grand achievernent. But the men at each end know what is sent, and could betray the confidence reposed in them if they pleased. We think we have reached the goal, but the patiënt ingenuity of the Saxon blood, of the Yankee race, will keep at work until finally in your grand-children's day it will send a message from San Francisco to Boston without a wire ; no man at either end will know what that message is, and it will run both ways at the same time. We are onlv touching on the edge of fringo of tho garment, and 1111doubtedly electricity, superceding steam, will light one house, perhaps, lift us up into. the air, carry us across the world, and absolutely raake man the lord, without a movement, of creation. But the Saxon has his great demerita. The Roman god was force, the Greek god was beauty, the Arabian god sensuality, the Mohammedan god exquisite perfumes, the beauty of woman, exquisite wines, the Saxon idea of a god before Christianity had come to the race, was not an outdoor scène ; it was no beauty like the Greek ; his heaven was a hall, beneath whose roof were gathered the victorious warriors, their battle-axes dripping blood and they were quaffing the means of in toxication out of the skulls of their ene mies. It represen ted two ideas - force and the stimulus to victory, and enhanc ing the delight of the liour of victory b; intoxication. and if you will watch thi Saxon race of ours as it marches down the centuries of a thousand years, you will find two great passions - see it in England and see it here, - first, to tram ple under our feet every neighboring race, to clear the ground for us, allow nc rival, no competitor. The genuine John Buil can neither bear a Scotchman nor an Irishman unless they are under hi feet; the genuine Yankee must absorb Mexico, invade Mexico, and take all the outlying islands. And it must intensify this glory of conquest by adding its in toxicants, and so you find we are the two drunkenest nations on the face of the earth."

Article

Subjects
Old News
Michigan Argus