onists had undertaken to achieve the impossible, when
they undertook to enlist the pulpit in the cause of the slaves, and to
purify the churches from all participation in the guilt of slavery. For
the average man, whether within or without the church, is not controlled
in his conduct toward his brother man by the principles and precepts of
Jesus, but by the laws of social and individual selfishness. These
selfish forces may at epochal moments align themselves with justice and
liberty, and they not infrequently do, otherwise human progress must be
at an end. In advancing themselves, they perforce advance justice and
liberty. Thus do men love their neighbors as themselves, and move
forward to fraternity and equality in kingdoms and commonwealths. The
special province of moral reformers, like Garrison and the
Abolitionists, seems to be to set these egoistic and altruistic elements
of human society at war, the one against the other, thereby compelling
its members and classes, willy nilly, to choose between the
belligerents. Some will enlist on one side, some on the other, but in
the furnace heat of the passions which ensues, an ancient evil, or a bad
custom or institution, gets the vitality burned out of it, which in due
time falls as slag out of the new order that arises at the close of the
conflict.

CHAPTER X.

BETWEEN THE ACTS.

Mr. Garrison, in a private letter to a friend under date of September
12, 1834, summarises the doings of the preceding twelve months of his
life, and makes mention of a fact which lends peculiar interest to that
time: "It has been the most eventful year," he remarks, "in my history.
I have been the occasion of many uproars, and a continual disturber of
the public peace. As soon as I landed I turned the city of New York
upside down. Five thousand people turned out to see me tarred and
feathered, but were disappointed. There was also a small hubbub in
Boston on my arrival. The excitement passed away, but invective and
calumny still followed me. By dint of some industry and much persuasion,
I succeeded in inducing the Abolitionists in New York to join our little
band in Boston, in calling a national convention at Philadelphia. We
met, and such a body of men, for zeal, firmness, integrity, benevolence,
and moral greatness, the world has rarely seen in a single assembly.
Inscribed upon a declaration which it was my exalted privilege to write,
their names can perish only with the know