uestions--intimates forbearing to ask the knowledge
which it may be dangerous to have--all remind one of those foreign
scenes which have hitherto been known to us, transatlantic republicans,
only in books."

On the passage of the Black Bill, as the Abolitionists stigmatised the
law, it was not believed that the moral sentiment of Boston would
execute it, so horrified did the community seem. But it was soon
apparent to the venerable Josiah Quincy that "The Boston of 1851 is not
the Boston of 1775. Boston," the sage goes on to remark, "has now become
a mere shop--a place for buying and selling goods; and, I suppose, also
of _buying and selling men_." The great idol of her shopkeepers, Daniel
Webster, having striven mightily for the enactment of the hateful bill
while Senator of the United States, had gone into Millard Fillmore's
Cabinet, to labor yet more mightily for its enforcement. The rescue of
Shadrach, which Mr. Secretary of State characterized "as a case of
treason," set him to thundering for the Union as it was, and against the
"fanatics," who were stirring up the people of the free States to resist
the execution of the Fugitive Slave Law. But he was no longer "the
God-like" Webster, for he appeared to the editor of the _Liberator_ as
"an ordinary-looking, poor, decrepit old man, whose limbs could scarce
support him; lank with age; whose sluggish legs were somewhat concealed
by an over-shadowing abdomen; with head downcast and arms shriveled, and
dangling almost helpless by his side, and incapable of being magnetized
for the use of the orator." The voice and the front of "the God-like"
had preceded the "poor decrepit old man" to the grave. Garrison dealt no
less roughly and irreverently with another of the authors of the wicked
law and another of the superannuated divinities of a shopkeeping North,
Henry Clay. "HENRY CLAY, with one foot in the grave," exclaimed the
reformer, "and just ready to have both body and soul cast into hell, as
if eager to make his damnation doubly sure, rises in the United States
Senate and proposes an inquiry into the expediency of passing yet
another law, by which every one who shall dare peep or mutter against
the execution of the Fugitive Slave Bill shall have his life crushed
out."

In those trial times words from the mouth or the pen of Abolitionists
had the force of deadly missiles. Incapacitated as Garrison was to
resort to physical resistance to the Fugitive Slave Law by his
no