on of political
abolitionists, some one said to him:

"Mr. Garrison, I am surprised at the ground you take! Do you not think
James G. Birney and Gerrit Smith are anti-slavery?"

He hesitated, and replied:

"They have anti-slavery tendencies, I admit."

Now, James G. Birney, when a young man, fell heir to the third of an
Alabama estate, and arranged with the other heirs to take the slaves as
his portion. He took them all into a free State, emancipated them, and
left himself without a dollar, but went to work and became the leader of
political abolitionists, while Gerrit Smith devoted his splendid talents
and immense wealth to the cause of the slave. When their mode of action
was so reprehensible to Mr. Garrison, we may judge the strength of his
opposition to that plan of action which resulted in the overthrow of
slavery. His non-resistance covered ballots as well as bullets, and
slavery, the creation of brute force and ballots, must not be attacked
by any weapon, save moral suasion. So it was, that Garrisonianism, off
the line of the underground railroad, was a rather harmless foe to
slavery, and was often used by it to prevent the casting of votes which
would endanger its power.

From the action of the slave power, it must by that time have been
apparent to all, that adverse votes was what it most dreaded; but
old-side Covenanters, Quakers, and Garrisonians could not cast these
without soiling their hands by touching that bad Constitution. But that
moral _dilettanteism_, which thinks first of its own hands, was not
confined to non-voting abolitionists; for the "thorough goers" of the
old Liberty Party, could not come down from their perch on platforms
which embraced all the moralities, to work on one which only said to
slavery "not another foot of territory."

Both these parties attacked me. The one argued that I, of necessity,
endorsed slavery every where by recognizing the Constitution; the other
that I must favor its existence where it then was, by working with the
Republican party, which was only pledged to prevent its extension. To
me, these positions seemed utterly untenable, their arguments
preposterous, and I did my best to make this appear. I claimed the
Constitution as anti-slavery, and taught the duty of overthrowing
slavery by and through it, but no argument which I used did half the
service of an illustration which came to me:

I had a little garden in which the weeds did grow, and little Bobbie
Mi