named governors, with an assurance of my belief that the new fanaticism had not made, nor was likely to make, proselytes among the respectable classes of our people. In this, however, I was mistaken."

History has left us, in this anecdote, a silhouette of Harrison Gray Otis, one of Boston's most eminent personages at that time, -the representative of the old Puritan blood, of the education, wealth, good looks, social prominence, and political power of Boston's leaders. In how short a time, and with how easy a transformation does patriot turn tyrant. Here is the nephew of James Otis, hand in glove with the iniquity of his age. He who was rocked in the cradle of liberty, is now the agent of the Inquisition. And he is perfectly innocent. He is a mere toy and creature of his time. A new issue has arisen that neither he nor his generation understand, and behold, they have become oppressors.

The Hercules that is to save mankind from these monsters is in the meanwhile working fourteen hours a day, setting type. The Liberator was begun without a dollar of capital and without a single subscriber. Garrison and his partner, Isaac Knapp, a young white man equally poor and equally

able to bear privation, composed, set, and printed the paper themselves. They lived chiefly upon bread and milk, a few cakes and a little fruit, obtained from the baker's shop opposite and from a petty cake and fruit shop in the basement. "I was often at the office of the Liberator," wrote the Rev. James C. White. "I knew of his (Garrison's) self-denials. I knew he slept in the office with a table for a bed, a book for a pillow, and a self-prepared scanty meal for his rations in the office, while he set up his articles in the Liberator with his own hand, and without previous committal to paper."

"It was a pretty large room," says Josiah Copley, who visited it in the winter of 1832-33, "but there was nothing in it to relieve its dreariness but two or three very common chairs and a pine desk in the corner, at which a pale, delicate, and apparently over-tasked gentleman was sitting.

I never was more astonished. All my preconceptions were at fault. My ideal of the man was that of a stout, rugged, dark-visaged desperado-something like we picture a pirate. He was a quiet, gentle, and I might say handsome man — a gentleman indeed, in every sense of the word."

"The dingy walls; the small windows, bespattered with printer's ink; the press standing in one corner; the composingstands opposite; the long editorial and mailing table, covered with newspapers; the bed of the editor and publisher on the floorall these," says Oliver Johnson, "make a picture never to be forgotten.”

IV

PICTURES OF THE

STRUGGLE

THERE are pages in the memoirs of Antislavery that shine with a light which sanctifies this continent, and which will be undiminished a thousand years hence. Nay, it will shine more clearly then than now; for we are still living in the valley of the shadow of death.

The war followed so quickly upon the true awakening of the nation as to the nature of slavery that those early watchers, whose cries had aroused us, were still in coventry; they were still held to be odious, although their piercing appeal had put life and religion into all. The North died for the slave, with condemnation of the Abolitionist upon its lips. This paradoxical outcome was due to the rapidity with which events moved during the final crisis. A revolution may be studied in its origins, and may be comprehended through its results; but during the actual cascade that leads from the one epoch to the other, scene succeeds

scene with such fury that history becomes unintelligible. In the years that intervened between the Kansas troubles and the outbreak of the war, so many things happened at once that all issues and all feelings were telescoped together. There followed the picturesque horrors and scenes of war-time; there followed the new patriotism, the new heroes, the New Legend,—all of it so vivid, so drenched in grief, so glorified by honor, so informed with the meaning of a new heaven and a new earth, that the immediate past was belittled. The Abolitionists thus passed straight from the odium of people preaching unpleasant truth to the odium of people proclaiming what everybody knows. They have never had a heyday. Their Their cause triumphed but not they themselves. They still remain under a cloud in America, and are regarded with some distrust by the historian and by the common man. I can scarcely find a man who sees in these early Abolitionists, as I do, the lamp and light of the whole after-coming epoch. Perhaps our age is still too near to theirs to do it justice; and the mere flight of time may bring men to a truer perspective of the whole matter.