obloquy, Douglass deserves a high rank; among the cultivated and forcible orators of the country, he was the chief representative of the colored people of the country, their pride and example, a man of noble purpose, grand achievement, wise counsel and pure life. His death takes from us the most picturesque figure which has come down to us from the days of the fathers.

From the "Christian Register," Boston, Mass., Feb. 28, 1895. ]
FREDERICK DOUGLASS.

"With a great price," Frederick Douglass might have said, “purchased I this freedom." Yet, though slave-born, the instincts of freedom were born in him. They early asserted themselves, and were with him a controlling influence during his whole life. It was foreseen by the slaveholders that slavery and a high degree of knowledge and intelligence could not exist together. The laws in all the Southern States prohibiting slaves from learning to read and write were enacted as a safeguard of slavery. To-day, when schools and colleges for the education of the colored people are springing up everywhere in the South, protected and fostered by State laws and crowded by eager throngs of colored youths, it may be hard to realize that Frederick Douglass had to learn to read and write by stealth, and that he was violating the laws of the State of Maryland in acquiring this knowledge. He likewise refused to regard himself as a piece of property, and added to his criminality by running away. The interesting details of his early life he has told in his autobiography.

Frederick Douglass had the joy not only of gaining his own freedom, but of seeing the enfranchisement of his race and its remarkable progress in the last twenty-five years. Yet race hatred dies slowly. There are States in the South in which it would have been unlawful for Mr. Douglass to ride in the same car with white men, his inferior in ability, knowledge and decorum. And one of his last addresses in Boston was directed against the evils of lynching in the South.

As Mr. Douglass saw that liberty was too great and too sacred a blessing for his own selfish enjoyment, he saw likewise that civil and political freedom could not be bound by sex any more than it could be bound by race. He became an earnest advocate of woman suffrage. He spoke in favor of temperance and other moral reforms. He was benevolent in spirit and progressive in ideas. He was a striking and commanding figure, especially in later years, when the large bronze face was crowned with hair like snow on the summit of Olympus.

Douglass wrought in no spirit of vindictiveness. It cost him something to obtain his freedom. It cost the South something, too. But it was worth to Douglass all that he paid for it, and worth to the

South vastly more than it cost; for there is nothing clearer than that the emancipation of the colored man was necessary to the emancipation of the white man. The South will some day erect monuments to Garrison, Phillips and Douglass, or, if it does not pay the debt in this way, it will be paid more fully by the perfect consummation of the liberty for which these men wrought.

From the "Advance," Chicago, Ill., Feb. 28, 1895.]

FREDERICK DOUGLASS.

The

And so another "grand old man, "for years the most picturesque and historically significant personality in America, is gone. great American negro will always remain one of the most distinctive and heroic characters in American history of the now closing century, at least so long as men care to remember that the youthful American Republic, boasting of matchless freedom, imagined that the mockery might continue and itself be "half slave and half free," until the conscience of the North was, at last, awakened, as it were, from the dead, enough to make it inevitable that the long "impending crisis" be settled by war and crowned by the immortal act of emancipation.

There has been no more heroic personage in the new world; none whose life and lifelong contention stood for more. The difference between what was and what is seems well-nigh incredible; a monstrous gulf spanned by this one life. To think back hardly fifty years ago to the condition of things in our own country, in New England even, when for a man, however otherwise honored and loved he might be, to stand up before his brethren and declare human slavery to be a wrong and a wickedness, a flagrant contradiction of the first principles of our governmental theory, and something that ought to be abolished, was to subject such a man to the special contumely, and likely as not to be chased out of town by ill-odorous eggs, if fortunately he escaped the coating of tar and feathers, now seems like peering back into prehistoric "dark ages."

But all of this Douglass saw and much of it he was. That he lived through it all and was permitted to see the consummated victory, and to be himself, though once a slave, one of the most universally honored and esteemed men in the nation, and to go on still pleading the rights and the hopes of his brethren of his own race, and to champion in various ways the cause of reform for the whole people, with that unique effectiveness of eloquent speech, that has but rarely ever been surpassed, all this appears now to have been a piece of poetic, rather than of providential justice.

To name Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass in one breath does no injury to the memory of either. Should the people of his

own race, North and South, unite by the gift of but a penny a piece for the erection at the Capital of the nation of a monument to his memory, not over pompous in size, but one fitted to last forever, all the world would applaud them for it.

Should the government itself be moved to erect some other memorial to match it, it would be an object lesson of perpetual and beautiful significance and moral usefulness. And one of the particular lessons which it would be fitted to be forever impressing on the minds of those observing it, would be this, that the world, at all events the Christian world, ought, sooner, to see the great open secrets of God's justice and of man's duty toward his brother man.

From the "Evangelist," New York City, Feb. 28, 1895.]
FREDERICK DOUGLASS.

The splendor of a great name borne by one who was born a slave and put himself in the front rank of philanthropy and patriotism, beside such men of mark as William Lloyd Garrison and Wendell Phillips, who made friends of poets like Whittier and Lowell, of Emerson, the philosopher and critic, of Holmes, most brilliant of modern essayists and of Sumner, the Bayard of anti-slavery reform, is the sufficient eulogy of one who has lately passed from life in the fullness of years and the ripeness of well-earned renown. Douglass was a free man before the war of emancipation. He was already named as one of the great abolitionists, when by a law of the Congress of the United States he fell under ban as a fugitive slave and was ransomed like a recent plantation runaway. This redemption of a man who had fought his way up from the lowest grade of bondman to the dignity of champion and advocate of his race before the whole civilized world, proved what Sumner had propounded in the Senate as the essential, intrinsic barbarism of slavery. When Anthony Burns was taken by slave hunters in the streets of Boston, and Dred Scott was handed over in Missouri to his captors, by a Supreme Court decision, the end of forbearance had come, the limit of endurance was passed, the slave power had humiliated the nation. In those days it was necessary for politicians to "trim ship" with extraordinary vigilance and adroitness. To them Douglass seemed a spectre of defeat. If he lifted those once manacled arms before the people, even before they caught the tremulous tones of his magical voice, they were swayed by uncontrollable emotion. Once in the old Broadway Tabernacle, filled up to the dome, as Douglass was announced, the vast crowd sprang up as one man, and the Marseillaise hymn, with a refrain "free soil, free speech, free press, free men," rolled out through doors and windows, blocking the street with lingering listeners for a hundred yards either way. Meanwhile

Douglass stood with bowed head, great tears coursing down his cheeks. "It is the angel of divine compassion and forgiveness!" sobbed one of the fifty vice-presidents of the meeting. But the avenging angel was on the way. Less than five years after that day the Massachusetts soldiers marched by, singing:

"He hath sounded forth the trumpet that shall never call retreat, He is sifting out the hearts of men before his judgment seat,''

while the whole city held its breath and strong men wept aloud.

In this way we can call Douglass the forerunner of emancipation. The great and terrible Civil War was to vindicate our unity as a nation. But the way for Lincoln was made clear by Douglass, and those who stood with him for freedom. He was no Spartacus. He fought Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry with all his might. He was for abolition by law and not by force. He had the sublime patience which made Lincoln and Washington so strong and so triumphant. He knew he was right and he could afford to wait. Now all men can see how State sovereignty and slavery, which it strove to defend, went out forever.

There was a certain moral grandeur in the position of Douglass which imparted a peculiar elevation to his character. He was an interesting study up to the end of his long life; but in the times which naturally pushed him to the front, he was something the like of which we had never seen before. Whence hath this man wisdom, whence these majestic traits? Heredity could not answer, for he never knew his parentage. He sprang from the depths of slavedom to be a witness against the system and for the slave. The freedmen owe more to Douglass than they can know. Our people were not blind to the perils of emancipation, nor to the difficulties of the problem we are still trying to solve. Whatever constitutional rights the freedmen have to-day were granted on the faith we had in such manhood as Douglass developed before our eyes. He was a sort of Colossus, over whom, as fulcrum, the friends of the negro threw the lever of citizenship in order to uplift the race. And now our appeal to them is not on the ground of their color or their previous condition, as if this or that gave them inalienable claims against all obligation of virtue and character, but it is on the fact of such a man and such a life, to be their model and inspiration. There is no citizenship without obligation. What Douglass did in spite of outward obstacles, the men of his race, in their way, must do against indolence and indulgence, if they would prove their birthright and wear liberty's crown!

From the "Christian World,” Strand, London, England, Feb. 28, 1895.] DEATH OF FREDERICK DOUGLASS.

Millions of colored people throughout the United States are mourning the sudden death of Frederick Douglass, ex-slave, great orator and fearless champion of his race. His funeral took place in Rochester, New York. All business was suspended and the whole population, with thousands who had flocked in, were among the mourners.

I saw Frederick Douglass at Chicago two summers ago, and I thought then, as I think now, that the human race can scarcely have produced a nobler specimen of humanity in any age or nation. Imagine a figure, tall, dignified, commanding, a great head, in shape not altogether unlike that of John Bright, but seeming to be much more massive, surmounted by thick bushy hair, as white as the driven snow, and showing with such striking effect against the dark brown of his smiling face. As we sat side by side in the Unitarian church, listening to the not unmusical voice of Rev. Jenkin Lloyd Jones, lecturing us on "Zoroaster," the warm sunshine of that beautiful morning seemed all the brighter for the sunny presence of this royal man in whom two races had combined to equip a hero.

Modern history affords no parallel to the career of Douglass. A slave, lashed and scarred, without a name, merely one amongst a herd of animals, beasts of burden, on the estate of the lordly planterUnited States Marshal, entrusted with the care of the President and the President-elect, in the most important ceremony of American life, and Minister of the great Republic to a distant State-truly the contrast is startling and wonderful. Riches, honor and power failed to spoil him; big and brave and tender-hearted, his later life was as beautiful in its modesty and quiet strength, as those early years of storm and stress and passion were splendid with battle and with victory. His letters to me, to the very last, have been charged with an affectionate gratitude to the English people for all their sympathy with an oppressed people, and have breathed a cheerful faith in the good time coming for his race.

Great-souled champion of a distressed but noble people, that voice which no tyranny which ever yet defied high heaven could silence, when right was to be defended or wrong defied, is not yet dumb! It was the name of Douglass which opened the hearts of the British people to Miss Wells, when that lady came to us unfriended and unknown. And as the weak are crushed down by the strong, as often as the oppressed cry to us for succor, whenever men with black skins are foully treated by men with white, in the Southern States by Americans, or in South Africa by Englishmen, the spirit of Frederick Douglass will inspire our demand for liberty and right. What Wordsworth said of Toussaint L'Ouverture, the hero of the Black Republic,