every family, that the same bloody deed might be acted over at any time and in any place, that the materials. for it were spread through the land, and were always ready for a like explosion.

It is impossible to doubt the sincerity of these men. They lived in the midst of slavery, most of them were slaveholders, and they all saw and felt how dangerous the system was, and how destructive of the very foundations of morality and prosperity. Why then did they not attack it boldly and insist upon its immediate abolition? It was because they were under the delusion, common in that day, and from which only a few Abolitionists had just been delivered, that, bad as slavery was, immediate emancipation would be worse; that the slaves, on being set free, would turn in vengeance upon the masters and give themselves up to riot and bloodshed. This delusion was long an absolute protection of slavery in communities where the slaves were numerous and where its strongest opponents dared not so much as hint its absolute sinfulness, or propose any other than an exceedingly gradual plan of emancipation. With what power these Virginians would have been clothed, if, seeing the terrible injustice of slavery and the dangers attending it, they had also seen with equal clearness that it would be perfectly safe to set every slave instantly free! But they were weak as water, while the champions of slavery, for the timebeing, had all the advantages of a fortified position. If the former had been as willing to have "the way of God expounded more perfectly unto them" by Garrison and Elizabeth Heyrick as the Jew Apollos was to learn of Aquila and Priscilla, they might have demolished the fortifications of the slaveholders and beaten them on the open field; instead of which they were themselves utterly routed and silenced, and Virginia thenceforth bound hand and foot by the Slave Power, and given over to work the "iniquity" of slavery and

the domestic slave-trade "with greediness." The men who had dared to assail slavery, and who afterward aspired to public station, were compelled to eat their own words, and thus descend to the same level with those who openly declared, with Mr. Gholson, that "the right of the slaveholder to his female slaves and their increase, was the same as that to his brood mares and their products."

To this vulgar complexion it came at last, and the State of Washington and Jefferson was not ashamed to owe her wealth chiefly to the profits derived from the sale of slaves, deliberately raised for the market like so many colts and calves! If Garrison's plea for immediate emancipation had been taken up and enforced by the Northern church and pulpit, the "mother of Presidents" might have been saved from this degradation, and the freedom of the slaves assured without the bloody arbitrament of a war that filled the land with mourning and woe. Never in all history was there another delusion so preposterous and absurd as that which affirmed that it was dangerous to free the slaves from their bonds. Not only was the delusion contrary to common sense, and a libel upon human nature and God, but its foolishness had been demonstrated again and again by actual experiment, as it was three years later by the results of emancipation in the British West Indies. If Mr. Garrison, like his predecessors in the cause, had been a gradualist, attributing the sin of slavery (as the Rev. Dr. Leonard Bacon did) to "those and those only who bore a part in originating such a constitution of society," and assigning the duty of emancipation to distant generations, he would have been as powerless as those bewildered denouncers of slavery in the Virginia Legislature, and his movement would have come to naught. A good general is careful in selecting the ground upon which to fight the enemy; above all he avoids placing his army in a quag

mire, where it can have no sound footing. The same principle is as important in moral as in physical warfare, and Garrison was wiser than his generation in that he saw that gradualism was a slough in which many a well-meaning band of reformers had been swallowed up, and that it would be useless to assail slavery on any other ground than that of its utter sinfulness and the duty of every slaveholder instantly to emancipate his slaves. God's law of eternal justice and righteousness must be uplifted and honored, and men must be made to understand the folly and wickedness of the assumption that obedience to that law is not safe. To attempt to abolish slavery while one's own mouth was filled with apologies for it as a system for which the generation then upon the stage was in no way responsible, and from which there was no way of present escape, would be idle.

It was the doctrine of immediate emancipation that imbued Garrison's arm with strength, and that made all the difference between success and failure in the movement he organized. As Wendell Phillips, standing over his coffin, said: "He seems to have understood-this boy without experience—he seems to have understood by instinct that righteousness is the only thing which will finally compel submission; that one, with God, is always a majority. He seems to have known at the very outset, taught of God, the herald and champion, God-endowed and God-sent to arouse a nation, that only by the most absolute assertion of the uttermost truth, without qualification or compromise, can a nation be waked to conscience or strengthened for duty."

It was the custom in that day to inveigh against immediatism as "impracticable." "You cannot," said our opponents, "emancipate all the slaves at once; why, then, do you propose so impossible a scheme?" Our reply was, that slaveholding being a sin, instant eman

cipation was the right of every slave and the duty of every master. The fact that the slaveholders were not ready at once to obey the demands of justice and the requirements of the Divine Law militated not against the soundness of the doctrine of immediatism or against its power as a PRACTICAL WORKING PRINCIPLE. The minister of the Gospel does not cease to proclaim the duty of immediate repentance for sin because he knows that his message will not be immediately heeded. It is his duty to contend for sound principles, whether his auditors "will hear or forbear." He dares not advise or encourage them to delay repentance for a single hour, though he knows that in all probability many of them will do so until their dying day.

The fanaticism of the Abolitionists consisted in applying to the sin of slavery the general principle which they had learned from the American pulpit. There was no impracticability in the scheme of immediate emancipation save that which arose from the determination of the slaveholders to persist in their sin, and from the encouragement they received at the hands of men who made themselves partakers in their iniquity. Even at this day, after all the light shed upon the subject from the results of emancipation in the West Indies, and in the face of the recorded testimony of Clarkson and Wilberforce, Brougham and O'Connell, and other eminent philanthropists, there are men of eminence in the church who pronounce immediate emancipation "a fantastic abstraction," and seek to cast reproach upon American Abolitionists for advocating a doctrine so wild and impracticable. But the slaveholders, who had seen many a scheme of gradualism come to naught, knew right well that the voice of Garrison, pleading for the right of every slave to instant freedom, would, unless it could be silenced, prove the knell of their hateful system.

'VII.

Battle with the Colonization Society - Garrison's "Thoughts”An Indictment with Ten Counts- Discussion - Mr. Garrison gives the Colored People a Hearing - Attempt to Found a Negro College in New Haven - The Town Thrown into an Uproar — The Project Defeated-The Canterbury Disgrace-The Burleigh Brothers - Why Windham County is Republican.

MR. GARRISON, when he joined Lundy in Baltimore, was a mild Colonizationist. Without investigating the subject for himself, he took it for granted that a scheme so earnestly supported by many of the best people in the country was worthy of encouragement; and in his Fourth of July address in Park Street Church, Boston, in 1829, he commended it in a few words which showed clearly enough that he did not regard it as a remedy for slavery. The friends of Colonization indeed were dissatisfied with his address, both for its uncompromising denunciations of slavery and its lack of zeal in their favorite enterprise. Having consecrated his life to the work of emancipation, he naturally sought the acquaintance and sympathy of the free colored people, among whom he was glad to find some men of intelligence, good judgment and high moral worth. He was astonished to find that, without exception, they regarded the Colonization Society with feelings of strong aversion and abhorrence. held it to be a cunning device of Southern men to avert some of the dangers that threatened the existence of slavery, and regarded as an affront to themselves the intimation that they were something less than citizens of the United States, and must consent to be deported to barbarous Africa in order to enjoy their

They