the hungry blood-hound to the devouring wolf--from
a corrupt and selfish world, to a hollow and hypocritical
church."--_Speech before American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society,
May_, 1854.

Four years or more, from 1837 to 1841, he struggled on, in New Bedford,
sawing wood, rolling casks, or doing what labor he might, to support
himself and young family; four years he brooded over the scars which
slavery and semi-slavery had inflicted upon his body and soul; and then,
with his wounds yet unhealed, he fell among the Garrisonians--a glorious
waif to those most ardent reformers. It happened one day, at Nantucket,
that he, diffidently and reluctantly, was led to address an anti-slavery
meeting. He was about the age when the younger Pitt entered the House of
Commons; like Pitt, too, he stood up a born orator.

William Lloyd Garrison, who was happily present, writes thus of Mr.
Douglass' maiden effort; "I shall never forget his first speech at the
convention--the extraordinary emotion it excited in my own mind--the
powerful impression it created upon a crowded auditory, completely taken
by surprise. * * * I think I never hated slavery so intensely as at
that moment; certainly, my perception of the enormous outrage which is
inflicted by it on the godlike nature of its victims, was rendered
far more clear than ever. There stood one in physical proportions and
stature commanding and exact--in intellect richly endowed--in natural
eloquence a prodigy."
[1]

It is of interest to compare Mr. Douglass's account of this meeting with
Mr. Garrison's. Of the two, I think the latter the most correct. It must
have been a grand burst of eloquence! The pent up agony, indignation and
pathos of an abused and harrowed boyhood and youth, bursting out in all
their freshness and overwhelming earnestness!

This unique introduction to its great leader, led immediately{10} to
the employment of Mr. Douglass as an agent by the American Anti-Slavery
Society. So far as his self-relying and independent character would
permit, he became, after the strictest sect, a Garrisonian. It is not
too much to say, that he formed a complement which they needed, and they
were a complement equally necessary to his "make-up." With his deep and
keen sensitiveness to wrong, and his wonderful memory, he came from the
land of bondage full of its woes and its evils, and painting them in
characters of living light; and, on his part, he found, told out in
sound Saxon phra