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FOREIGN INFLUENCE:

SUMMARY

IN every great fluctuation that takes place in human society,- whether it be a moral, a political, or even an industrial phenomenon,- force converges upon some one man, and makes him the metaphysical center and thought-focus of the movement. The man is always a little metamorphosed by his office, a little deified by it. He is endued with supernatural sagacity, or piety, or resiliency. He is fed with artificial life, through the fact that thousands of men are sustaining him by their attention and in their hope. Thus in 1858, Lincoln suddenly became the great general-agent of political Antislavery in America; because his brain was exactly fitted for this work, which deified him quite rapidly. So of a hundred other cases of deification or demonization : leaders seem to be grabbed, used and flung aside by immaterial and pitiless currents of force, which had as lief destroy as benefit their darlings. Witness the career of Stephen A. Douglas.

Garrison was the leader of Abolition from its inception to its triumph. His genius, and his activity kept it a unity, despite the incessant tearing and crumbling that were the normal accompaniment of its spreading influence. "I have never met the man or woman," said Wendell Phillips in 1865, "who had struck any effectual blow at the slave system in this country, whose action was not born out of the heart and conscience of William Lloyd Garrison." There is a certain verbal exaggeration in Phillips' statement; but the idea conveyed is true. Garrison's preeminence is incontestable. In agitation, as elsewhere, the great man eats up the little man; he sets the clock in the little man's bosom by his own chronometer, or rather, all this is done for both of them by the stress of the times. There never was a leader of men more completely consumed by his mission than Garrison. His life was sucked up into Anti-slavery. He had no attention for other things. How he obtained food and lodging for his family during all these years is a mystery. From time to time, it seems, his friends would relieve his wants, or pay a doctor's bill. He was supported by his Cause the benevolence which he generated

fed him. At the close of the war Garrison occupied a position of great eminence; and he could have cut a figure in public had he wished it. For, although the Abolitionists and Lincoln's Administration found some difficulty in coming to understand each other at the outset, they were in moral union before long; and they fought the war through together. "It was my privilege once, and once only, to talk with Abraham Lincoln, at Petersburg, Va., April 6, 1865,” says Daniel H. Chamberlain. "His face,

his figure, his attitudes, his words, form the most remarkable picture in my memory, and will, while memory lasts. I spoke to him. of the country's gratitude for his great deliverance of the slaves. His sad face beamed for a moment with happiness as he answered in exact substance, and very nearly in words: 'I have been only an instrument. The logic and moral power of Garrison, and the Anti-slavery people of the country and the army, have done all.'”

Garrison had no worldly ambition; he even declined to assist Governor Andrew with political advice in the days of the triumph of Abolition at the close of the war. He neglected and refused to write his own memoirs though offered large sums of

money to do so. He sank into private life as easily as if he had truly been the benevolent, self-educated clockmaker of a Pickwickian kind, whose type he physically resembled. The storm which had engendered this dragon passed over, and left behind it a placid old man.

We must now revert to certain antibellum doings of the Abolitionists which had a profound influence upon the diplomatic history of the country during the war. While the demoniac Garrison was, in 1833, stirring his American caldron with his right hand, he reached over with his left and set a-going another vessel in England, which was destined to be of enormous importance to this country. Garrison made five journeys to England, namely in 1833, 1840, 1846 and 1867, and 1877. In the first, he clasped hands with all the philanthropists in England who were, at that time, assembled to witness the final triumph of the law abolishing Slavery in the West Indies. His immediate object in this journey was to unmask the American Colonization Society before the British public, and to bring the non-conformist conscience of England into true relations with American Abolition. He visited the venerable

Clarkson, he met Wilberforce, Zachary Macaulay, Samuel Gurney, Thomas Fowell Buxton, and many other men and women of this kind. At the suggestion of Daniel O'Connell he held a meeting in Exeter Hall, where O'Connell spoke. Garrison was at one with these warm-hearted people in England as water is at one with water. They loved him; they doted on him, and he on them.

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As we have seen, George Thompson came to America in 1835, as an apostle to the Abolition Cause. Harriet Martineau came as a traveler in the same year. By her writings, and especially by her Martyr Age in America," she explained to the English mind the Anti-slavery situation in this country. After the year 1835 there existed a bond between the philanthropists of England and of America. Constant intercourse, the sending of money and articles from England to the Cause in America, and an affectionate personal correspondence between the most unselfish classes in each country, led to the consolidation of a sort of Anglo-Saxon alliance of the only desirable kind,—an alliance between loving and public-spirited persons in each country. As the outcome of this international union, which