t could not carry
stronger conviction, nor be stated in less pregnable form. In proof
of this, I may say, that having been submitted to the attention of the
Garrisonians in print, in March, it was repeated before them at their
business meeting in May--the platform, _par excellence_, on which they
invite free fight, _a l'outrance_, to all comers. It was given out in
the clear, ringing tones, wherewith the hall of shields was wont to
resound of old, yet neither Garrison, nor Phillips, nor May, nor Remond,
nor Foster, nor Burleigh, with his subtle steel of "the ice brook's
temper," ventured to break a lance upon it! The doctrine of the
dissolution of the Union, as a means for the abolition of American
slavery, was silenced upon the lips that gave it birth, and in the
presence of an array of defenders who compose the keenest intellects in
the land.

_"The man who is right is a majority"_ is an aphorism struck out by
Mr. Douglass in that great gathering of the friends of freedom, at
Pittsburgh, in 1852, where he towered among the highest, because, with
abilities inferior to none, and moved more deeply than any, there was
neither policy nor party to trammel the outpourings of his soul. Thus
we find, opposed to all disadvantages which a black man in the United
States labors and struggles under, is this one vantage ground--when the
chance comes, and the audience where he may have a say, he stands forth
the freest, most deeply moved and most earnest of all men.

It has been said of Mr. Douglass, that his descriptive and declamatory
powers, admitted to be of the very highest order, take precedence of
his logical force. Whilst the schools might have trained him to
the exhibition of the formulas of deductive{16} logic, nature and
circumstances forced him into the exercise of the higher faculties
required by induction. The first ninety pages of this "Life in Bondage,"
afford specimens of observing, comparing, and careful classifying,
of such superior character, that it is difficult to believe them the
results of a child's thinking; he questions the earth, and the children
and the slaves around him again and again, and finally looks to _"God in
the sky"_ for the why and the wherefore of the unnatural thing, slavery.
_"Yes, if indeed thou art, wherefore dost thou suffer us to be slain?"_
is the only prayer and worship of the God-forsaken Dodos in the heart of
Africa. Almost the same was his prayer. One of his earliest observations
w