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. 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 of 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 to a cabinet-maker. But he was still discontented, yearning continually for an occupation more congenial to his feelings and tastes, and his articles of apprenticeship were cancelled at his own earnest request. He found, at length, his right place in a printing-office in his native town. This proved for him both high school and college, from which he graduated with honor after a long and faithful apprenticeship. During the period of his minority he became deeply interested in current moral and political questions, upon which he wrote frequently and acceptably for the newspaper on which he daily worked as a printer, "The Newburyport Herald." He also contributed to a Boston paper a series of political essays, which, being anonymous, were by many attributed to the Hon. Timothy Pickering, then one of the most eminent citizens of Massachusetts. At the end of his apprenticeship he became the editor of a new paper, "The Free Press," in his native place. It was distinguished for its high moral tone, but proved unremunerative, as such papers generally do. He was next heard of as editor of "The National Philanthropist," in Boston, the first paper ever established to support the doctrine of total abstinence from intoxicating drinks. The theme was congenial to him, and he discussed it with great earnestness and ability. The motto of the paper was his own. It expressed a great truth in these words: "Moderate drinking is the down-hill road to drunkenness." This was in 1827-28. While engaged upon this paper he made the acquaintance of Benjamin Lundy, who came to Boston for the purpose of interesting some of the people of that city in the question of slavery. Sometime in 1828 Mr. Garrison accepted an invitation to go to Bennington, Vt., to establish a paper for the support of John Quincy Adams for the Presidency. The title of this paper was "The Journal |