and is as really a
slave-holding section of the republic as Georgia or South Carolina."
Sprague, he finds, "in amicable companionship and popular repute with
thieves and adulterers; with slaveholders, slavedealers, and
slave-destroyers; ... with the disturbers of the public peace; with the
robbers of the public mail; with ruffians who insult, pollute, and
lacerate helpless women; and with conspirators against the lives and
liberties of New England citizens."

To Otis who was then nearly seventy years of age Garrison addressed his
rebuke in tones of singular solemnity. It seemed to him that the aged
statesman had transgressed against liberty "under circumstances of
peculiar criminality." "Yet at this solemn period," the reprobation of
the prophet ran, "you have not scrupled, nay, you have been ambitious,
to lead and address an excited multitude, in vindication of all
imaginable wickedness, embodied in one great system of crime and
blood--to pander to the lusts and desires of the robbers of God and his
poor--to consign over to the tender mercies of cruel taskmasters,
multitudes of guiltless men, women, and children--and to denounce as an
'unlawful and dangerous association' a society whose only object is to
bring this nation to repentance, through the truth as it is in Jesus."

These audacious and iconoclastic performances of the reformer were not
exactly adapted to turn from him the wrath of the idol worshipers. They
more likely added fuel to the hot anger burning in Boston against him.
Three weeks passed after his departure from the city, and his friends
did not deem it safe for him to return. Toward the end of the fourth
week of his enforced absence, against which he was chafing not a little,
an incident happened in Boston which warned him to let patience have its
perfect work. It was on the night of September 17th that the
dispositions of the city toward him found grim expression in a gallows
erected in front of his house at 23 Brighton street. This ghastly
reminder that the fellow-citizens of the editor of the _Liberator_
continued to take a lively interest in him, "was made in real
workmanship style, of _maple joist_ five inches through, eight or nine
feet high, for the accommodation of two persons." Garrison and Thompson
were the two persons for whom these brave accommodations were prepared.
But as neither they nor their friends were in a mood to have trial made
of them, the intended occupants consented to give Bo