ot the key to interpret its
significance. What he saw, that he set down for his readers, without
fear or favor. He had not seen slavery, knew nothing of the evil.
Acquaintance with the deeper things of life, individual or national,
comes only with increasing years, they are hardly for him who has not
yet reached his majority. Slavery was the very deepest thing in the life
of the nation sixty-four years ago. And if Garrison did not then so
understand it, neither did his contemporaries, the wisest and greatest
of them so understand it. The subject of all others which attracted his
attention, and kept his editorial pen busy, was the claim of
Massachusetts for indemnity from the general government, for certain
disbursements made by her for the defence of her sea-coast during the
war of 1812. This matter, which forms but a mere dust point in the
perspective of history, his ardent young mind mistook for a principal
object, erected into a permanent question in the politics of the times.
But the expenditure of enormous energies upon things of secondary and of
even tertiary importance, to the neglect of others of prime and lasting
interest, is supremely human. He was errant where all men go astray. But
the schoolmaster of the nation was abroad, and was training this young
man for the work he was born to do. These six months were, therefore,
not wasted, for in the university of experience he did ever prove
himself an apt scholar. One lesson he had learned, which he never needed
to relearn. Just what that lesson was, he tells in his valedictory to
the subscribers of the _Free Press_, as follows: "This is a time-serving
age; and he who attempts to walk uprightly or speak honestly, cannot
rationally calculate upon speedy wealth or preferment." A sad lesson, to
be sure, for one so young to learn so thoroughly. Perhaps some reader
will say that this was cynical, the result of disappointment. But it was
not cynical, neither was it the result of disappointment. It was
unvarnished truth, and more's the pity, but truth it was none the less.
It was one of those hard facts, which he of all men, needed to know at
the threshold of his experience with the world. Such a revelation proves
disastrous to the many who go down to do business in that world.
Ordinary and weak and neutral moral constitutions are wrecked on this
reef set in the human sea. Like a true mariner he had written it boldly
on his chart. There at such and such a point in the voya