ollars in four months and the weekly expenditure
amounted to at least that sum, the financial failure of the enterprise
was inevitable. This unhappy event did actually occur six weeks before
the junior editor went to jail; and the partnership was formally
dissolved in the issue of the _Genius_ of March 5, 1830. But when Arthur
Tappan made his generous offer of a hundred dollars to effect Garrison's
release, he made at the same time an offer of an equal amount to aid the
editors in reestablishing the _Genius_. This proposition led to hopes on
the part of the two friends to a renewal of their partnership in the
cause of emancipation. And so Garrison's visit to the North was taken
advantage of to test the disposition of Northern philanthropy to support
such a paper. But what he found was a sad lack of interest in the slave.
Everywhere he went he encountered what appeared to him to be the most
monstrous indifference and apathy on the subject. The prejudices of the
free States seemed to him stronger than were those of the South. Instead
of receiving aid and encouragement to continue the good work of himself
and coadjutor, and for the doing of which he had served a term of seven
weeks in prison, men, even his best friends sought to influence him to
give it up, and to persuade him to forsake the slave, and to turn his
time and talents to safer and more profitable enterprises nearer home.
He was informed by these worldly wise men and Job's counselors that his
"scheme was visionary, fanatical, unattainable." "Why should he make
himself," they argued, "an exile from home and all that he held dear on
earth, and sojourn in a strange land, among enemies whose hearts were
dead to every noble sentiment?" Ah! he himself confessed that all were
against his return to Baltimore. But his love of the slave was stronger
than the strength of the temptation. He put all these selfish objections
behind him. As he has recorded the result of this experience:
"Opposition served only to increase my ardor, and confirm my purpose."
Strange and incomprehensible to his fellows is the man who prefers
"persecution, reproach, and poverty" with duty, to worldly ease and
honor and riches without it. When a man appears in society who is not
controlled by motives which usually govern the conduct of other men he
becomes at first an object of pity, then of contempt, and, lastly, of
hate. Garrison we may be sure at the end of this visit had made rapid
transit from