This is no place to depict those scenes of slave-holding outrages, supported as they were by a Northern President with Southern principles.  The sight of them rapidly changed the pacific character of the free States.  Many a peace man dropped his peace principles before this bloody duel between the civilization of the South and that of the North.  Ministers and churches took up collections to send, not Bibles, but Sharp’s rifles to their brethren in Kansas.  The South had appealed to the sword, and the North had sternly accepted the challenge.  War was in the air, and the Northern temper, without there being any general consciousness of it, was fast mounting to the war point in the thermometer of the passions, thanks to the perfidy and ruffianism of the slave-power in Congress and Kansas.

This trend and strong undertow of the nation toward a civil outbreak and commotion, though unnoted by the multitude, was yet, nevertheless, seen and felt by many thoughtful and far-seeing minds; and by no one more clearly than by T.W.  Higginson, who at the twentieth anniversary of the Boston mob, discoursed thus on this head:  “Mr. Phillips told us that on this day, twenty years ago, the military could not protect the meeting, because the guns were outside in the mob—­or the men who should have carried them!  There has been a time since when the men were on the outside and the guns too; and as surely as this earth turns on its axis, that time will come again!  And it is for you, men, who hear me, to think what you will do when that time comes; and it is for you, women, who hear me, to think what you will do, and what you are willing—­I will not say, to consent that those you love should do, but what you are willing to urge them to do, and to send them from your homes, knowing that they will do it, whether they live or die.”  The murderous assault upon Charles Sumner in the Senate Chamber at Washington by Preston S. Brooks, served to intensify the increasing belligerency of the Northern temper, to deepen the spreading conviction that the irrepressible conflict would be settled not with the pen through any more fruitless compromises, but in Anglo-Saxon fashion by blood and iron.

Amid this general access of the fighting propensity, Garrison preserved the integrity of his non-resistant principles, his aversion to the use of physical force as an anti-slavery weapon.  Men like Charles Stearns talked of shouldering their Sharp’s rifles against the Border ruffians as they would against wild beasts.  For himself, he could not class any of his fellow-creatures, however vicious and wicked, on the same level with wild beasts.  Those wretches were, he granted, as bad and brutal as they were represented by the free State men of Kansas, but to him they were less blameworthy than were their employers and indorsers, the pro-slavery President and his Cabinet, pro-slavery Congressmen, and judges, and doctors of divinity, and editors.  Incomparably guilty as these “colossal