One spoke to the cold, calculating side of the British nation, which asks “if the new idea will pay?” The other spoke to the infinite side of human nature--the side which asks, first of all, “is it right? is it just? is it humane?” Wherever these two great men appeared, the people assembled in thousands.
From his autobiography, Douglass describes the contrasting rhetorical styles of British reformers Richard Cobden and John Bright and their appeal to different aspects of human nature.
Share
More from Frederick Douglass
They cannot be coaxed or driven to vote with their enemies against their friends.
No power beneath the sky can make an ignorant, wasteful, and idle people prosperous, or a licentious people happy.
In any fair condition of things the men who till the soil will become proprietors of the soil.