eld throughout the North by Abolitionists. At the
great meeting in Boston, held in Tremont Temple, and presided over by
Samuel E. Sewall, Garrison inquired as to the number of non-resistants
who were present. To this question there came a solitary reply. There
was but one non-resistant beside himself in the hall. Where were his
followers? Why had they forsaken their principles? The tide of Northern
belligerency, which was everywhere rising to its flood, everywhere
rushing and mounting to the tops of those dams which separate war and
peace had swept away his followers, had caused them to forsake their
principles. True to their Anglo-Saxon instinct, they had reverted to the
more human, if less Christian method of cutting the Gordian knot of the
republic with the sword.

The irresistible drift of the North toward the point where peace ends
and war begins, which that solitary "I" at the John Brown meeting
denoted, was still further indicated by what appeared not wholly unlike
a change in Mr. Garrison's attitude on the same subject. His
non-resistant position was the same, but somehow his face seemed to turn
warward too, with the rest of the nation, in the following passage taken
from his address at that John Brown meeting:

"Nevertheless, I am a non-resistant," said he, speaking to that solitary
confession of non-resistance principles, "and I not only desire, but
have labored unremittingly to effect the peaceful abolition of slavery,
by an appeal to the reason and conscience of the slaveholder; yet, as a
peace man, an ultra peace man, I am prepared to say: Success to every
slave insurrection at the South, and in every slave country. And I do
not see how I compromise or stain my peace profession in making that
declaration. Whenever there is a contest between the oppressed and the
oppressor, the weapons being equal between the parties, God knows that
my heart must be with the oppressed, and always against the oppressor.
Therefore, whenever commenced, I cannot but wish success to all slave
insurrections.... Rather than see men wearing their chains, in a
cowardly and servile spirit, I would as an advocate of peace, much
rather see them breaking the head of the tyrant with their chains. Give
me, as a non-resistant, Bunker Hill, and Lexington, and Concord, rather
than the cowardice and servility of a Southern slave plantation."

The unmistakable signs of disintegration, the swift action of the
national tragedy, the Charleston C