after all, the conclusive evidence is given by Garrison's own sons. It is impossible to read their book and not see with what facility harsh language came to Garrison's lips from his very boyhood, without reference to the antislavery movement. It was a part of that stern school of old-fashioned Calvinism in which he was trained. "The least of sins is infinite," says the English High Church poet, Faber; and this was the early attitude of Garrison's mind. At twenty-three he wrote, "It is impossible to estimate the depravity and wickedness of those who at the present day reject the gospel of Jesus Christ," meaning, apparently, those who held the very views that he himself lived to hold. A little later, editing in Vermont what had hitherto been a party paper, he wrote of those who supposed that it was still to be such, "The blockheads who have had the desperate temerity to propagate this falsehood." These are but specimens. Now, when a young man. begins with such questionable extravagance of epithet in matters of religion and politics, is it to be supposed that, when he is called upon to cope with an institution which even the milder Wesley called "the sum of all villanies," he will suddenly develop the habit of absolute justice?" I will be harsh as truth," he said. Was he never any harsher?

That there was such a thing possible as undue harshness in speaking of individual slave-holders the abolitionists themselves were compelled sometimes to admit. When Charles Remond, the eloquent colored orator, called George Washington a villain, Wendell Phillips replied, Charles, the epithet is infelicitous." Yet if, as was constantly assumed by Garrison, the whole moral sin of slave-holding rested on the head of every individual participant, it is difficult to see why the epithet was not admirably appropriate. The point of doubt is whether it did so rest; but if it did Remond was right. Such ex

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treme statements were not always thus rebuked. When a slave-holder was once speaking in an antislavery convention, he was flatly contradicted by Stephen Foster, who was perhaps, next to Garrison, the hardest hitter among the abolitionists. Do you think I would lie?" retorted the slave-holder. "Why not?" said Foster. "I know you steal." This Draconian inflexibility, finding the least of sins worthy of death, and having no higher penalty for the greatest, was a very common code upon the antislavery platform. It was a part of its power, but it brought also a certain weakness, as being really based upon an untruth. It was not true that each individual slave-holder had the whole weight of the national sin upon him, for the simple reason that a collective sin is the accumulated work of successive generations, and it is unjust to hold any single person responsible for all. Indeed, as a general rule, men are better than their laws.

Nothing in Dr. Channing's book, except his criticisms of the abolitionists, so roused Garrison's wrath as the admission that there might be slave-holders who "deserved great praise," because they opposed slavery, while retaining their own slaves. But surely the time has come when the most ardent abolitionist may recognize that there might have been many such men. Compare this statement of Channing's with one of Garrison's, as given by his biographers. He wrote, for instance, thus:

"For myself, I hold no fellowship with slave-owners. I will not make a truce with them even for a single hour. I blush for them as countrymen, — I know that they are not Christians; and the higher they raise their professions of patriotism or piety, the stronger is my detestation of their hypocrisy. They are dishonest and cruel, and God and the angels and devils and the universe. know that they are without excuse." (I. 205.)

"Without excuse!" Set aside all the facts of heredity, of environment, of early association, of ignorance, of all that makes excuse in thoughtful minds for sin. Let us take the precise facts of the relation between master and slave, as it presented itself in multitudes of cases, even to a slave-holder whose eyes had been opened. In all the great States of South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi, a slave-holder was absolutely prohibited from emancipating his slaves, except by authority of the legislature specially granted in each case, a permission often utterly impossible to obtain. In one of these States, Mississippi, it was farther required that this legislative act should be for some meritorious action or public service on the part of the individual slave; and the same condition was made in North Carolina, with the substitution of the county court for the legislature. In every one of these States, the slave-owner, had he been Garrison himself, was as powerless to free his slaves without the concurrence of the community as he would have been to swim the Atlantic with those slaves on his back; and yet these men were "without excuse." Even in the Northern slave States, where manumission was easier, it was sometimes accompanied, as in Virginia, with the provision that the freed slaves should be removed from the State within a certain time, or, in default of that, sold at auction,-a provision almost as hopelessly prohibitory as the more direct obstacles. In the mortgaged and deeply indebted plantations of Virginia, the most enlightened slave-holder rarely had the means of removing his slaves to any distance from the plantation, and how then was he to get them beyond the borders of the State? - to say nothing of the question what he was to do with them when thus removed. The more we dwell on this complicated situation, the more impressed we become with the vast wrong of the institution and of its

avowed propagandists; while the more charitable we become towards those exceptional slave-holders who had opened their eyes to its evils, yet found themselves bound hand and foot. All these facts were as well known to Garrison as to us, because the book which is our authority for these statements (Stroud's Slave Laws, pages 146-51) was familiar to the abolitionists, and was often cited in evidence. We might almost suppose that Garrison, through severe theological nurture and long habit, had impaired the power to measure the weight of his own language. How hard he found it to be wholly consistent in his personal applications is plain from the fact that the very newspaper in which the above tremendous invective appeared was also devoted to "a dignified support of Henry Clay and the American system."

The third fault habitually found with Garrison by his critics was that of mingling the antislavery movement with alien elements which threatened to destroy its unity and concentration. Out of this grew what the present biographers call "the great schism" between "old organization" and "new organization." tion." This occupies the greater part of the second volume, and will be found, we cannot help suspecting, about as interesting to the younger race of readers as a history of the division between Unitarians and Trinitarians in Massachusetts, or that between Taylorism and Tylerism in Connecticut. Such readers will even find it hard not to apply to the whole affair that phrase "liliputian proceedings," which the biographers employ for something else. (II. 177.) But here, as elsewhere, even the details are worth reading, were it only to see by the plain frankness of the sons how much foundation there was for all this complaint. The common impression that the great division in the antislavery ranks began with Garrison's defense of women's participation is here thoroughly set aside. That question aggravated, but did not

near

create, the contest. It began, as this book shows, with an editorial by Garrison in the Liberator, distinctly indicating his change of views on the Sabbath question, - a matter in regard to which he had before been conservative. It was a position naturally offensive to that large number of abolitionists who were strongly evangelical men, and yet who were relied on for the pecuniary support of the Liberator. But the division did not come to a crisis until the great reformer had reached a phase of opinion of vagary, as the uncharitable would call it - which came utterly swamping and subordinating his antislavery action itself. It would scarcely be believed, were it not here announced in his own words, that there was a time when Garrison had serious thoughts of making the cause of the slave utterly subordinate to a vast and cloudy scheme of millennial reform, with which he was originally inoculated, as his sons expressly admit, by a man (John Humphrey Noyes) whose subsequent unsavory career as founder of the Oneida Community is well known. This is Garrison's statement of his own position (August 28, 1837): —

"I feel somewhat at a loss to know what to do,- whether to go into all the principles of holy reform, and make the abolition cause subordinate, or whether still to persevere in the one beaten track, as hitherto. Circumstances hereafter must determine this matter." (II. 160.) In accordance with this he printed in the Liberator, with his own full indorsement, a long manifesto by Noyes, passages of which read like some of the wildest speculations of the English zealots under the Commonwealth; and this at a time when the Liberator was sustained at the cost of the Massachusetts Antislavery Society.

Now if Garrison himself recognized this divided allegiance in his own mind, who could expect his allies to be blind to it? Elizur Wright wrote, "I look

me.

upon your notions of government and religious perfectionism as downright fanaticism, as harmless as they are absurd. I would not care a pin's head if they were preached to all Christendom; for it is not in the human mind (except in a peculiar and, as I think, diseased state) to believe them." Then he points out that the real danger involved is "a bottomless pit of distrust between you and the abolitionists. . . . Let the government alone till, such as it is, all are equally protected by it, and after that you may work your will upon it, for all But if this cannot be done, why, come out plainly, and say you have left the old track and are started on a new one, such as it is, and save us from the miserable business of making disclaimers." Such straightforward remonstrances were not, perhaps, wholly in vain, for Garrison dropped, or thought he dropped, the scheme of giving himself primarily to these vaster projects, whose expressed basis was "the overthrow of the nations." (II. 147.) But he did not really abandon them, he did not put them out of sight in the Liberator; and yet he denounced unsparingly, thenceforward, those who had thus helped to save him from the malign influence that had threatened to find him an easy prey. Noyes, soon after this, disappears from the record, but "the hand of Noyes," as the biographers in another place call it, was visible in the ultimate organization of the Non-Resistance Society, although, in the manifesto of the latter, the original cloudiness of phraseology was a good deal condensed. Enough, however, remained to make it plain that the Liberator was thenceforward to be conducted on an essentially no-government platform, and that all its course, in respect to voting and voters, was to be determined by this position.

All this was clearly within Garrison's right, after the Liberator had, at the original suggestion of Whittier, ceased to be sustained by any society. The

wrong began when Garrison and his friends claimed not merely that he should control his own organ, but that there should be no other. To an outside observer, nothing could seem plainer than that, if the voting abolitionists found themselves constantly attacked and vilified in the Liberator, they had at least the right to establish a paper of their own; but when they presumed to do this, in the Massachusetts Abolitionist, they were met with epithets of which "plot" and "intrigue" were among the mildest. We do not see how any reader can read that part of these volumes relating to the establishment of this rival antislavery journal without seeing that Garrison and his immediate friends virtually assumed the right of dictatorship over the whole agitation, and ruled that it should be carried on through a non-resistant organ, or not at all. It shows the extraordinary personal power of Mr. Garrison that he was able to exercise this benevolent despotism so long; but, unfortunately, the longer it remained, the greater the acrimony on both sides after the spell was broken. This bitterness was exceedingly apparent, for instance, in Mrs. Chapman's memoir of Harriet Martineau; and it colors every expression of opinion on the part of Mr. Garrison's biographers.

The authors of this memoir express the opinion, in their final paragraph, that those who have read their narrative of the great division in the antislavery ranks "must conclude" that Garrison had no choice but to oppose the political abolitionists. It is an assumption worthy, in its unflinching frankness, of the sons of a father who never was haunted by a doubt as to receiving the final approval of all right-thinking persons in everything he did. Our own opinion is that many readers of this book, perhaps the majority, will draw just the opposite inferences, on many points, from both the father and the sons. They will conclude that William Lloyd Garrison was one of

the strongest men of his time, — perhaps the very strongest, and that he may, very possibly, have influenced American history more profoundly than Lincoln or Grant; but they will also thank his biographers for revealing, even unconsciously, the faults that made him human, les défauts de ses qualités. To conceal them would have been an injustice to the other men among the early abolitionists, who, while admiring his splendid heroism, sometimes found him a hard man to work with. There is every reason to believe that he mellowed with time, and that his younger admirers saw less of these drawbacks than the earlier ones. Yet it is certain that these faults not only embarrassed his immediate work, but prevented him from exercising that foresight as to means which he showed eminently as to ends. He never faltered in his belief that slavery would fall; thus far his prediction was unerring. But there is no evidence that he ever foresaw that the two immediate instrumentalities by which it was destined to fall were the very two against which he had been so long contending, — the ballot-box and war. The most bigoted conservative did not exceed Garrison in his utter refusal to recognize the humble beginnings of that triumphant political organization which ultimately grew. and expanded, under varying names, until it carried Abraham Lincoln into the presidency. It was not merely that Garrison detested and distrusted this movement, as organized by men who had revolted from his immediate leadership, but he convinced himself that it was contemptible and even ludicrous. When an antislavery candidate was first nominated for the presidency, he called it "folly, presumption, almost unequaled infatuation," and if he ever varied from this attitude of contempt it was to "denounce it," in his own words, "as the worst form of proslavery." All this visibly makes no impression upon his sons, but it must impress the impartial

reader. In estimating the infallibility of an oracle, we must consider also the unfulfilled prophecies.

But it is impossible to close this first installment of these memoirs without feeling that Garrison kept higher laws than he broke, that he did the work of a man of iron in an iron age; so that even those who recognized his faults may well have joined, as they did join, in the chorus of affectionate congratulation that attended his closing days. As for his fame, it is secure; and all the securer for our knowing, more definitely than before, the limitations of his foresight and the drawbacks of his tempera

ment. It is a striking fact that, in the rapidly expanding Valhalla of contemporary statues in Boston, only two-those of Webster and Everett - commemorate those who stood for the party of defense in the great antislavery conflict; while all the rest - Lincoln, Sumner, Andrew, Mann, Harriet Martineau, and, prospectively, Garrison, Parker, and Shaw-represent the party of attack. It is the verdict of time, confirming in bronze and marble the great words of Emerson : "What forests of laurel we bring, and the tears of mankind, to those who stood firm against the opinion of their contemporaries!"

It is so seldom that a comprehensive subject finds the best equipped author to treat it that when the happy conjunction occurs in the case of a topic so leading and delicate as American poetry, as it does in this volume,' the guild should be free with its plaudits. The guild certainly, which has its share, men think, of human weakness, should be highly pleased; there are few of its members, living or dead, who will not find their shadowy names in this New World Pantheon. Not to be mentioned here argues one's self unknown indeed. This metropolitan acquaintance, this urban welcome, is a distinguishing trait of excellence in the work; there is a pleasurableness, too, in the ease and grace of it, in the delightful tolerance with which the author stands in the vestibule of that Temple of Fame, whose structure, alas, is most familiar to childish eyes, and greets the Manes of the departed as readily as a professional

1 Poets of America. By EDMUND CLARENCE STEDMAN. Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin & Co. 1885.

nomenclator, and passes them on with deft dispatch to find their niches within, until at the end of the half-hour audience he withdraws to the inner hall where the feast is spread for the Di Majores; and when all is over, and he goes out at the gate, his familiarity is not less wide nor his kindly recognition less frequent among the crowding aspirants who are waiting for news from within that Venerable Edifice. This long-drawn simile hardly does justice to the long-drawn procession of the defunct who are, or are to be; but it serves to indicate a prime quality of the author, and one most beneficial to his study, his catholicity. Nor is it the catholicity of a literary dictionary; it is penetrative and enlightening as well as inclusive. The days of magisterial criticism have gone by. Our author is by no manner of means a Rhadamanthus of judgment, but a host who is anxious to discover and bring out the good qualities of his visitors, and cares more for their particular faculty of entertainment, however narrow, than for their possibly multi