SOURCE: Tolstoy, Leo. Introduction to A Short Biography of William Lloyd Garrison, by Vladimir Tchertkoff and F. Holah, pp. v-xii. London: The Free Age Press, 1904.

In the following essay, Tolstoy acknowledges Garrison's decisive articulation of “the principle of non-resistance to evil by violence,” which champions rational and moral persuasion over violent coercion.

I thank you very much for sending me your biography of Garrison.

Reading it, I lived again through the spring of my awakening to true life. While reading Garrison's speeches and articles I vividly recalled to mind the spiritual joy which I experienced twenty years ago, when I found out that the law of non-resistance—to which I had been inevitably brought by the recognition of the Christian teaching in its full meaning, and which revealed to me the great joyous ideal to be realised in Christian life—was even as far back as the forties...