es with him he was prone to treat
as gross departures from principle, as evidences of faithlessness to
freedom. He fell upon the men who did not see eye to eye with him with
tomahawk and scalping knife. He was strangely deficient in a sense of
proportion in such matters. His terrible severities of speech, he
visited upon the slave-power and the Liberty party alike. And although a
non-resistent, in that he eschewed the use of physical force, yet there
never was born among the sons of men a more militant soul in the use of
moral force, in the quickness with which he would whip out the rapiers,
or hurl the bolts and bombs of his mother tongue at opponents. The
pioneer must have been an unconscious believer in the annihilation of
the wicked, as he must have been an unconscious believer in the
wickedness of all opposition to his idea of right and duty. This, of
course, must be taken only as a broad description of the reformer's
character. He was a man, one of the grandest America has given to the
world, but still a man with his tendon of Achilles, like the rest of his
kind.

His narrow intolerance of the idea of anti-slavery political action, and
his fierce and unjust censure of the champions of that idea, well
illustrate the trait in point. Birney and Whittier, and Wright and
Gerritt Smith, and Joshua Leavitt, he apparently quite forgot, were
actuated by motives singularly noble, were in their way as true to their
convictions as he was to his. No, there was but one right way, and in
that way stood the feet of the pioneer. His way led directly,
unerringly, to the land of freedom. All other ways, and especially the
Liberty party way, twisted, doubled upon themselves, branched into
labyrinths of folly and self-seeking. "Ho! all ye that desire the
freedom of the slave, who would labor for liberty, follow me and I will
show you the only true way," was the tone which the editor of the
_Liberator_ held to men, who were battering with might and main to
breach the walls of the Southern Bastile. They were plainly not against
the slave, although opposed to Mr. Garrison, narrowly, unjustly opposed
to him, without doubt, but working strenuously according to their lights
for the destruction of a common enemy and tyrant. This was the test,
which Garrison should have taken as conclusive. The leaders of the
Liberty party, though personally opposed to him and to his line of
action, were, nevertheless, friends of the slaves, and ought to have