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346 T. W. Davenport. ^vas none of the art of the actor. Through the transparent medium of inimitable speech, Lewis exhibited the victims of oppression, excruciating under the lash and the branding iron; their bleeding hearts were laid open to sight; the slave was seen to be a human being in agony, body and soul. And the cause was as visible as the effects. It was slavery— normal slavery, and not it's so-called abuses. Some will say that such spasms of sympathy are short-lived, which is cer- tainly true, for human nature cannot continue excessive action in any of its departments. But the relapse is not to the former stupid standard of self-service. There has been a diversion; the crust of indolent habit has been broken never to reform with its original strength ; access to the sympathetic nature is less difficult than before. After this wonderful campaign, the Whig orator, Billy Bebb, the most famous of Tom Corwin's students, found the Buckeyes a changed people. His oratorical climaxes raised no shouts ; the expounder of whiggery elicited no enthusiasm, and in a sort of despair he shouted the question, "Is Sam Lewis God Almighty To which an irreverant listener re- sponded in the affirmative, eliciting the first round of ap- plause. The people of Ohio were on higher grounds, and the slave-catcher was unwelcome thereafter. I doubt if any other man in America could have accom- plished such results. And it is idle to suppose that an orator can produce effects from aroused sympathies in which he is not affluent. There is no such thing in human nature as universal versatility. No man can be great in all departments of human endeavor, and hence the difficulty of comparing orators of different casts of mind. Colonel Baker, though possessed of much, indeed, of unusual versatility, would have been wholly incompetent to the task. The effects he wrought were of a totalty different nature, those of heroic enthusiasm in which the sterner virtues impelled men to do and dare in a glorious cause, and every cause he espoused was glorious— he made it glorious. In the language of Macaulay, "His chivalrous soul would not suffer him to decline a risk,** and