ered into their work.
They were not particularly religious. They neither very greatly
reverenced nor feared the Church, whose leaders they often accused of
a hankering for the "flesh-pots" that induced them to lead their
followers into Egypt, rather than out of it. They were partly moved by
a hatred of slavery and its long train of abuses that was
irrepressible, and which to most persons was incomprehensible, and
partly by a love for their fellows in distress that was so insistent
as to make them forget themselves. Their impulses seemed to be largely
intuitive, if not instinctive, and if called upon for a philosophical
explanation they could not have given it.

In such a struggle for freedom and natural human rights as was carried
on by the Abolitionists against tremendous odds and through a term
covering many long years, it does seem to the writer of this essay
that mortal heroism reached its height.

Nor am I by any means alone in the opinion just expressed. As far back
as 1844, when the Abolitionists were few in number and the objects of
almost savage persecution in every part of our country, the Earl of
Carlisle, who, in his day was one of the most capable leaders of
British public opinion, declared that they were engaged "in fighting a
battle without a parallel in the history of ancient or modern
heroism."

I am moved to write the story of the Abolitionists, partly because it
is full of romantic interest, and partly because justice demands it.
Those doughty file leaders in the Anti-Slavery fight do not to-day
have an adequate acknowledgment of the obligations that the country
and humanity should recognize as belonging to them, and they never
have had it. Much of the credit that is fairly theirs has been
mis-applied. Writers of history--so called, although much of it is
simple eulogy--have been more and more inclined to attribute the
overthrow of slavery to the efforts of a few men, and particularly one
man, who, after long opposition to, or neglect of, the freedom
movement, came to its help in the closing scenes of a great conflict,
while the earlier, and certainly equally meritorious, workers and
fighters have been quite left out of the account. The writer does not
object to laborers who entered the field at the eleventh hour, sharing
with those who bore the heat and burden of the day; but when there is
a disposition to give to them all the earnings he does feel like
protesting.

The case of the Abolitionist