s_, stamping upon their brows the scarlet letter
of their crime against liberty. He had said in the October before: "It
is time that a voice of remonstrance went forth from the North, that
should peal in the ears of every slaveholder like a roar of thunder....
For ourselves, we are resolved to agitate this subject to the utmost;
nothing but death shall prevent us from denouncing a crime which has no
parallel in human depravity; we shall take high ground. _The alarm must
be perpetual._" A voice of remonstrance, with thunder growl
accompaniment, was rising higher and clearer from the pen of the young
editor. His tone of earnestness was deepening to the stern bass of the
moral reformer, and the storm breath of enthusiasm was blowing to a
blaze the glowing coals of his humanity. The wail of the fleeing
fugitive from the house of bondage sounded no longer far away and unreal
in his ears, but thrilled now right under the windows of his soul. The
masonic excitement and the commotion created by the abduction of Morgan
he caught up and shook before the eyes of his countrymen as an object
lesson of the million-times greater wrong daily done the slaves. "All
this fearful commotion," he pealed, "has arisen from the abduction of
_one man_. More than two millions of unhappy beings are groaning out
their lives in bondage, and scarcely a pulse quickens, or a heart leaps,
or a tongue pleads in their behalf. 'Tis a trifling affair, which
concerns nobody. Oh! for the spirit that rages, to break every fetter of
oppression!" Such a spirit was fast taking possession of the writer.

Of this Lundy was well informed. He had not lost sight of his young
coadjutor, but had watched his course with great hope and growing
confidence. In him he found what he had discovered in no one else,
anti-slavery activity and perseverance. He had often found men who
protested loudly their benevolence for the negro, but who made not the
slightest exertion afterward to carry out their good wishes. "They will
pen a paragraph, perhaps an article, or so--and then--_the subject is
exhausted!_" It was not so with his young friend, the Bennington editor.
He saw that "argument and useful exertion on the subject of African
emancipation can never be exhausted until the system of slavery itself
be totally annihilated." He was faithful among the faithless found by
Lundy. To reassure his doubting leader, Garrison took upon himself
publicly a vow of perpetual consecration to the