its purpose, if it can, to crush them entirely out of existence.  When the Government shall succeed (if it shall succeed) in conquering a peace, in subjugating the South, and shall undertake to carry out the Constitution as of old, with all its pro-slavery compromises, then will be my time to criticise, reprove, and condemn; then will be the time for me to open all the guns that I can bring to bear upon it.  But blessed be God that ‘covenant with death’ has been annulled, and that ’agreement with hell’ no longer stands.  I joyfully accept the fact, and leave all verbal criticism until a more suitable opportunity.”

But it must be confessed that at times during the struggle, Lincoln’s timidity and apparent indifference as to the fate of slavery, in his anxiety to save the Union, weakened Garrison’s confidence in him, and excited his keenest apprehensions “at the possibility of the war terminating without the utter extinction of slavery, by a new and more atrocious compromise on the part of the North than any that has yet been made.”  The pioneer therefore adjudged it prudent to get his battery into position and to visit upon the President for particular acts, such as the revocation of anti-slavery orders by sundry of his generals in the field, and upon particular members of his Cabinet who were understood to be responsible for the shuffling, hesitating action of the Government in its relation to slavery, an effective fire of criticism and rebuke.

Nevertheless Mr. Garrison maintained toward the Government a uniform tone of sympathy and moderation.  “I hold,” said he, in reply to strictures of Mr. Phillips upon the President at the annual meeting of the Massachusetts Society in 1862; “I hold that it is not wise for us to be too microscopic in endeavoring to find disagreeable and annoying things, still less to assume that everything is waxing worse and worse, and that there is little or no hope.”  He himself was full of hope which no shortcomings of the Government was able to quench.  He was besides beginning to understand the perplexities which beset the administration, to appreciate the problem which confronted the great statesman who was at the head of the nation.  He was getting a clear insight into the workings of Lincoln’s mind, and into the causes which gave to his political pilotage an air of timidity and indecision.

“Supposing Mr. Lincoln could answer to-night,” continued the pioneer in reply to his less patient and hopeful coadjutors, “and we should say to him:  ’Sir, with the power in your hands, slavery being the cause of the rebellion beyond all controversy, why don’t you put the trump of jubilee to your lips, and proclaim universal freedom?’—­possibly he might answer:  ’Gentlemen, I understand this matter quite as well as you do.  I do not know that I differ in opinion from you; but will you insure me the support of a united North if I do as you bid me?  Are all parties and all sects at the North so convinced and so united on this point