o the war point in the
thermometer of the passions, thanks to the perfidy and ruffianism of the
slave-power in Congress and Kansas.

This trend and strong undertow of the nation toward a civil outbreak and
commotion, though unnoted by the multitude, was yet, nevertheless, seen
and felt by many thoughtful and far-seeing minds; and by no one more
clearly than by T.W. Higginson, who at the twentieth anniversary of the
Boston mob, discoursed thus on this head: "Mr. Phillips told us that on
this day, twenty years ago, the military could not protect the meeting,
because the guns were outside in the mob--or the men who should have
carried them! There has been a time since when the men were on the
outside and the guns too; and as surely as this earth turns on its axis,
that time will come again! And it is for you, men, who hear me, to think
what you will do when that time comes; and it is for you, women, who
hear me, to think what you will do, and what you are willing--I will not
say, to _consent_ that those you love should do, but what you are
willing to _urge_ them to do, and to send them from your homes, knowing
that they will do it, whether they live or die." The murderous assault
upon Charles Sumner in the Senate Chamber at Washington by Preston S.
Brooks, served to intensify the increasing belligerency of the Northern
temper, to deepen the spreading conviction that the irrepressible
conflict would be settled not with the pen through any more fruitless
compromises, but in Anglo-Saxon fashion by blood and iron.

Amid this general access of the fighting propensity, Garrison preserved
the integrity of his non-resistant principles, his aversion to the use
of physical force as an anti-slavery weapon. Men like Charles Stearns
talked of shouldering their Sharp's rifles against the Border ruffians
as they would against wild beasts. For himself, he could not class any
of his fellow-creatures, however vicious and wicked, on the same level
with wild beasts. Those wretches were, he granted, as bad and brutal as
they were represented by the free State men of Kansas, but to him they
were less blameworthy than were their employers and indorsers, the
pro-slavery President and his Cabinet, pro-slavery Congressmen, and
judges, and doctors of divinity, and editors. Incomparably guilty as
these "colossal conspirators against the liberty, peace, happiness, and
safety of the republic" were; and, though his moral indignation "against
their trea