twenty miles around to shake one Quaker! The cotton traffic had become immensely profitable, and Quakers in the great cities loved its gains as well as others. The still, small voice of conscience was overwhelmed by the hoarse clamors of avarice. It was a universally accepted proverb that slavery was absolutely necessary to the production of a staple that was filling the coffers of Northern merchants and manufacturers with untold wealth. The moral sense of the people of the North became paralyzed. Pulpit and press were generally silent. If they spoke at all it was only to say that slavery was too dangerous a subject to be discussed that the Union would not long survive its agitation. To Benjamin Lundy chiefly belongs the honor of keeping the flame of Anti-Slavery sentiment from utterly dying out in those dark days, and putting the burning torch of liberty into the hands of the man raised up by Providence to lead the new crusade against the Slave Power. No careful student of history can fail to be struck by the fact that in every crisis of human affairs men have been raised up with special qualifications for the work that needed to be done at that particular time. The hour strikes for the achievement of a great reform, and lo! a man appears upon the stage, commissioned and equipped of God for the task. He gives the keynote for rallying thousands; he sounds the charge against an iniquitous institution, mighty in aspect, but ripening for destruction. He calls a nation to repentance for its crimes against humanity, and warns it of the Divine retributions for sin. Such men are the prophets of God in their generation — misrepresented, persecuted, maligned, and sometimes slain; but always honored of God, and sure at last to be honored of men. What a catalogue of such men, "of whom the world was not worthy," might be culled from the pages of history men whose bloody footsteps are the way marks of human progress, and to whom, under God, we owe what is most valuable in our civilization, and most beneficent in the application of Christianity to society and its institutions. One of the greatest of all this host, the prophet of one of the grandest reforms that the world has ever witnessed, was the man whose labors and achievements will find a partial record in these pages. It is not any clearer to me that Moses was commissioned to lead the children of Israel out of the house of bondage, that Elijah was sent of God to rebuke the iniquity of Ahab, or that Jesus of Nazareth (I speak with reverence) came into the world to "bear witness unto the truth,' than it is that Mr. Garrison was raised up by Divine Providence to deliver this Republic from the sin and crime of slavery. The circumstances of his appearance were remarkable. The nation was fast asleep, and heard not the rumblings of the earthquake that threatened her destruction. The state was morally paralyzed; the pulpit was dumb; the church heeded. not the cry of the slave. Commerce, greedy of gain, piled her hoards by the unpaid toil of the bondman. Judgment was turned away backward; Justice stood afar off; Truth was fallen in the street, and Equity could not enter. The hands of the people were defiled with blood, their fingers with iniquity; their lips spoke lies, their tongues muttered perverseness. Men talked of slavery in that day (when they talked at all) with an incoherency like that of Bedlam, with a moral blindness and perverseness like that of Sodom and Gomorrah. That in this hour of thick darkness a voice was heard pleading, trumpet-tongued, for immediate emancipation, as the duty of every master and the right of every slave, seems to us now one of the most signal illustrations of the immanence of God in human affairs. I must believe that that voice, crying in the wilderness and calling the people to repentance, was divinely inspired - not, indeed, in a miraculous, but certainly in a providential sense. It spoke for God's outraged law of justice and love. It pleaded for the inalienable rights of man. It rebuked a sin that was preying upon the nation's life. WILLIAM LLOYD GARRISON was born in Newburyport, Mass., in a house still standing in close proximity to the church, under whose pulpit repose the remains of George Whitefield, on the 10th of December, 1805. His father was a sea-captain from New Brunswick, and a man of some literary ability and ambition. His mother was a deeply religious woman—a Baptist, when to be such required no small amount of moral courage. The son inherited the mother's intuitive reverence for God and for human nature as his image, her fine moral and spiritual sensitiveness, and her abhorrence of oppression in all its forms. As a boy he was responsive to those sentiments of liberty and patriotism which pervaded the political and social atmosphere of the time. His opinions upon every question affecting the public_welfare rested upon the solid basis of the Divine Law. Ethical considerations in his mind outweighed all others, and any compromise with an unjust or oppressive institution was, in his eyes, a sin to be rebuked and denounced. His clear moral vision, penetrating at once all the subterfuges of the champions and apologists of slavery, enabled him to discern the true character of the system, and to depict it in language that stirred the consciences and moved the hearts or those who read or listened. Mrs. Garrison, while her son was yet too small to support comfortably the weight of the lapstone, set him to learning the trade of a shoemaker. As he was unhappy in this occupation, she next apprenticed him |