Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 34.djvu/570

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
554
THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

is dominant. He has always been ready to leave the search for knowledge to go to the defense of freedom of thought and action, but never to give that up for any other consideration. This trait has been shown publicly in his answer to Orestes A. Brownson's attack upon the Hungarian revolutionists; in his eulogy of Thomas Jefferson as an apostle of the rational freedom of individual men in government; in his speech, after the Republican presidential nomination of 1856, when he urged his fellow-Germans to support Fremont; in his argument against the assumption that our Government is founded upon the Christian religion, as in derogation of the rights of non-Christian citizens; and in many other addresses and in newspaper articles and law cases.

It was also strikingly manifested in his presiding over a public meeting addressed by Wendell Phillips, when the orator was made a mark for missiles, and Judge Stallo stood by his side and bore the brunt of the assault with him. This was in 1862, when Mr. Phillips was invited to speak in Cincinnati in favor of emancipation. A bitter prejudice existed against him because he had been a disunionist. Judge Stallo had been invited to introduce him, but declined, because, his sympathies never having been with Mr. Phillips, he was not the proper man to perform that office. But when he was informed that other men whom he had mentioned as more suitable had declined, because they were afraid of a mob, he consented, saying, "That is enough, gentlemen—I will be there." Mr. Phillips, after being introduced, was at once assailed with a shower of disagreeable and dangerous missiles. One of them hit Judge Stallo. "During the turmoil and uproar," said Judge Stallo, telling the story several years afterward, "Mrs. Stallo, with Mrs. Schneider, sat behind a fellow who had risen and aimed a big stone at the speaker. As he threw his hand back to fire the stone, Mrs. Stallo, who entered heart and soul into the spirit of the hour, and had no thought but to stand by her friends in the stormy crisis, reached over and hit the fellow's wrist a hard blow, making him drop the stone and howl with pain. He looked around to see his assailant, and Mrs. Stallo was up and ready for him, but gentlemen hastened to her side, and the fellow moved away." In the law case of Rothgeb vs. Mauck and Others, Judge Stallo maintained the right of an infidel to have a temperately worded declaration of his sentiments recorded upon his tombstone and admitted to the cemetery. In a case in which certain action of the Board of Education of Cincinnati was involved, he opposed the enforcement of the singing of hymns and the reading of the Bible in the public schools, because they were objected to by a part of the citizens who were taxed to support the schools. The reading was enjoined by the