his lady combines strength with beauty, argumentation with persuasiveness, greatness with humility.  Birney is collected, courteous, dispassionate—­his fearlessness excites admiration, his conscientiousness commands respect.”  Of these writers, which is acceptable to slaveholders or their apologists?  Some have been cruelly treated and all been calumniated as “fanatics, disorganizers, and madmen.”  And why?  “Certainly not for the phraseology which they use, but for the principles which they adopt.”

From another quarter came presently notes of discord, aroused by Garrison’s hard language.  Sundry of the Unitarian clergy, under the lead of Rev. Henry Ware, Jr., took it into their heads that the editor of the Liberator and some others were outrageously abusing the Abolition cause, “mismanaging it by their unreasonable violence” of language.  Wherefore those gentlemen interposed to rescue the great cause from harm by a brilliant scheme designed to secure moderation in this regard.  This brilliant scheme was nothing less absurd than the establishment of a censorship over the Liberator.  But as these solicitous souls had reckoned without their host, their amiable plan came to naught; but not, however, before adding a new element to the universal discord then fast swelling to a roar.  To the storm of censure gathering about his head the reformer bowed not—­neither swerved he to the right hand nor to the left—­all the while deeming it, “with the apostle, a small thing to be judged by man’s judgment.”  “I solicit no man’s praise,” he sternly replies to his critics, “I fear no men’s censure.”

There was still another cause of offence given by Garrison to his countrymen.  It was not his hard language, but a circumstance less tolerable, if that was possible, than even that rock of offence.  It seems that when the editor of the Liberator was in England, and dining with Thomas Powell Buxton, he was asked by the latter in what way the English Abolitionists could best assist the anti-slavery movement in America, and he had replied, “By giving us George Thompson.”  This unexpected answer of the American appeared without doubt to the Englishman at the time somewhat extraordinary.  He had his misgivings as to the wisdom, to say nothing of the propriety, of an international act of such importance and delicacy as the sending of George Thompson to America.  He questioned whether the national self-love of the American people would not resent the arrival of an Englishman on such a mission among them and refuse him a fair hearing in consequence.  But Garrison was confident that while Thompson’s advent would stir up the pro-slavery bile of the North and all that, he would not be put to much if any greater disadvantage as a foreigner in speaking in New England on the subject of slavery, than were those Abolitionists who were to the manner born.  As to his friend’s personal safety in the East, Garrison was extremely optimistic, had not apparently the slightest apprehensions for him in this regard.