nd, indeed, only to put one
part of it, I may say that it is a triumph which has had the
effect of raising 4,000,000 of human beings from the very lowest
depths of social and political degradation to that lofty height
which men have attained when they possess equality of rights in
the first country on the globe. (Cheers.) More than this, it is
a triumph which has pronounced the irreversible doom of slavery
in all countries and for all time. (Renewed cheers.) Another
question suggests itself--how has this great matter been
accomplished? The answer suggests itself in another question.
How is it that any great matter is accomplished? By love of
justice, by constant devotion to a great cause, and by an
unfaltering faith that that which is right will in the end
succeed. (Hear, hear.)

When I look at this hall, filled with such an assembly; when I
partake of the sympathy which runs from heart to heart at this
moment in welcome to our guest of to-day, I cannot but contrast
his present position with that which, not so far back but that
many of us can remember, he occupied in his own country. It is
not forty years ago, I believe about the year 1829, when the
guest whom we honor this morning was spending his solitary days
in a prison in the slave-owning city of Baltimore. I will not
say that he was languishing in prison, for that I do not
believe; he was sustained by a hope that did not yield to the
persecution of those who thus maltreated him; and to show that
the effect of that imprisonment was of no avail to suppress or
extinguish his ardor, within two years after that he had the
courage, the audacity--I dare say many of his countrymen used
even a stronger phrase than that--he had the courage to commence
the publication, in the city of Boston, of a newspaper devoted
mainly to the question of the abolition of slavery. The first
number of that paper, issued on the 1st January, 1831, contained
an address to the public, one passage of which I have often read
with the greatest interest, and it is a key to the future life
of Mr. Garrison. He had been complained of for having used hard
language, which is a very common complaint indeed, and he said
in his first number: "I am aware that many object to the
severity of my language, but is there not cause for such
severity? I will be as