has any white slaves, either at home or abroad, is it not true that there are thousands of her population, both at home and abroad, who are deprived of their just rights, who are grievously oppressed, who are dying even in the midst of abundance, of actual starvation?  YES!’ and I expressly called upon British Abolitionists to prove themselves the true friends of suffering humanity abroad, by showing that they were the best friend of suffering humanity at home.”  Truth, justice, duty, always overrode with him the proprieties, however sacredly esteemed by others.  Of a piece with this fact of the placard of the white slave was his custom in refusing the wine proffered by some of his British friends to their guests.  He was not content with a simple refusal and the implied rebuke which it involved, he must needs couple his declaration with an express rebuke to host and hostess for tempting men into the downward way to drunkenness.

While in attendance upon the sessions of the World’s Convention Garrison received tidings, of the birth of his third child.  The second, whom he named for himself, was born in 1838.  The third, who was also a son, the fond father named after Wendell Phillips.  Three children and a wife did not tend to a solution of the always difficult problem of family maintenance.  The pressure of their needs upon the husband sometimes, simple as indeed they were owing to the good sense and prudence of Mrs. Garrison, seemed to exceed the weight of the atmospheric column to the square inch.  The fight for bread was one of the bitterest battles of the reformer’s life.  The arrangement made in 1837, whereby the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society assumed the responsibility of the publication of the Liberator, Garrison rescinded at the beginning of 1838, for the sake of giving himself greater freedom in the advocacy in its columns of the several other reforms in which he had enlisted, besides Abolitionism.  But Garrison and the paper were now widely recognized as anti-slavery essentials and indispensables.  Many of the leaders of the movement perceived, as Gerritt Smith expressed it in a letter enclosing fifty dollars for the editor, that “Among the many things in which the Abolitionists of our country should be agreed, are the two following:  (1) The Liberator must be sustained; (2) its editor must be kept above want; not only, nor mainly, for his own or his family’s happiness; but that, having his own mind unembarrassed by the cares of griping poverty, he may be a more effective advocate of the cause of the Saviour’s enslaved poor.”  A new arrangement, in accordance with this suggestion for the support of the paper and the preservation of the editor from want, was made in 1839, and its performance taken in charge by a committee of gentlemen, who undertook to raise the necessary funds for those objects.  Thus it was that Garrison, through the wise and generous provision of friends, was enabled to augment the happiness of an increasing family, and at the same time add to his own effectiveness as an anti-slavery instrument.