WENDELL PHILLIPS ON PRUSSIA.
[TO THE EDITOR OF THE SPECTATOR."]
Sur„—Wendell Phillips, the great slavery abolitionist of Boston, Massachusetts, whose effective use of historical allusion in public speaking was attributed by himself to the fact that he had mastered one thing thoroughly, the period of the English. Revolution, in 1873 used the following language in a public speech describing our principal enemy:— "What does Prussia represent 7 She represents the reorganized feudal system of the nineteenth century. She is a power marshalled into form by the one purpose of courts and soldiers. She is not a nation : she is an army. Her great public schools and all her civil life have a great, if not primary, purpose in the design to make men soldiers. Every man of the population—banker, mechanic, tradesman or scholar—everything but the pulpit—goes for the three appointed years into the camp to be disciplined to arms ; and Prussia's policy is an effort to drag the world back three hundred years. She is the great military outgrowth, the abnormal mon- strosity, of the nineteenth century."
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