parties for conscience's sake, and joined the movement, deserve our
commendation and sympathy; at the same time, it is our duty to show
them, and all others, that there is a higher position to be attained by
them or they will have the blood of the slave staining their garments.
This can be done charitably yet faithfully. On the two old parties,
especially the Whig-Taylor party, I would expend--_pro tempore_, at
least--our heaviest ammunition." This is as it should be, the tone of
wise and vigilant leadership, the application of the true test to the
circumstances, viz., for freedom if against slavery; not to be
satisfied, to be sure, with any thing less than the whole but disposed
to give credit to whom it was due, whether much or little. Pity that the
pioneer could not have placed himself in this just and discriminating
point of view in respect of his old enemy, Liberty party, praising in it
what he found praiseworthy, while blaming it for what he felt was
blameworthy. But perfection weak human nature doth not attain to in this
terrestrial garden of the passions, and so very likely the magnanimity
which we have desired of Garrison is not for that garden to grow but
another and a heavenly.

Garrison ill brooked opposition, came it from friends or foes. He was so
confident in his own positions that he could not but distrust their
opposites. Of course, if his were right, and of that doubt in his mind
there was apparently none, then the positions of all others had to be
wrong. This masterful quality of the man was constantly betrayed in the
acts of his life and felt by his closest friends and associates in the
anti-slavery movement. Quincy, writing to Richard Webb, narrates how, at
the annual meeting of the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1843,
Garrison was for removing it to Boston, but that he and Wendell Phillips
were for keeping it where it then was in New York, giving at the same
time sundry good and sufficient reasons for the faith that was in them,
and how, thereupon, "Garrison dilated his nostrils like a war-horse, and
snuffed indignation at us." "If the Boston friends were unwilling to
take the trouble and responsibility," were the petulant, accusative
words put by Quincy into his chief's mouth on the occasion, "then there
was nothing more to be said; we must try to get along as well as we
could in the old way." And how they disclaimed "any unwillingness to
take trouble and responsibility," while affirming "the n