* *

Seen from Mount Olympus, how small and pitiful must seem the antics of
Earth--all these churches and little sects--our laws, our arguments, our
courts of justice, our elections, our wars!

Viewed across the years, the Abolition Movement seems a small thing. It
is so thoroughly dead--so far removed from our present interests! We
hear a Virginian praise John Brown, listen to Henry Watterson as he
says, "The South never had a better friend than Lincoln," or brave
General Gordon, as he declares, "We now know that slavery was a gigantic
mistake, and that Emerson was right when he said, 'One end of the
slave's chain is always riveted to the wrist of the master.'"

We can scarcely comprehend that fifty years ago the trinity of money,
fashion and religion combined in the hot endeavor to make human slavery
a perpetuity; that the man of the North who hinted at resisting the
return of a runaway slave was in danger of financial ruin, social
ostracism, and open rebuke from the pulpit. The ears of Boston were so
stuffed with South Carolina cotton that they could not hear the cry of
the oppressed. Commerce was fettered by self-interest, and law ever
finds precedents and sanctions for what commerce most desires. And as
for the pulpit, it is like the law, in that Scriptural warrant is always
forthcoming for what the pew wishes to do.

Slavery, theoretically, might be an error, but in America it was a
commercial, political, social and religious necessity, and any man who
said otherwise was an enemy of the State.

William Lloyd Garrison said otherwise. But who was William Lloyd
Garrison? Only an ignorant and fanatical freethinker from the country
town of Newburyport, Massachusetts. He had started four or five
newspapers, and all had failed, because he would not keep his pen quiet
on the subject of slavery.

New England must have cotton, and cotton could not be produced without
slaves. Garrison was a fool. All good Christians refused to read his
vile sheet, and businessmen declined to advertise with him or to
subscribe to his paper.

However, he continued to print things, telling what he thought of
slavery. In Eighteen Hundred Thirty-one, he was issuing a periodical
called, "The Liberator."

I saw a partial file of "The Liberator" recently at the Boston Public
Library. They say it is very precious, and a custodian stood by and
tenderly turned the leaves for me. I was not allowed even to touch it,
and when I was