With the discontinuance of the Liberator Garrison’s active career came to a close.  But his sympathetic interest in the freedmen, temperance, the cause of women, and in other reformatory enterprises continued unabated.  He watched with stern and vigilant eye, and bleeding heart the new rebellion at the South whose purpose was the nullification of the civil and political rights of the blacks, and the overthrow of the military rule of the National Government in the Southern States.  He did not see what time has since made clear that a genuine reconstruction of the South, and the ultimate solution of the Southern problem had, in accordance with social laws, to proceed from within, from the South itself, not from without and from Washington.  The old fire again burned in his speech as tidings of the violence of the whites and the sufferings of the blacks reached him from the former slave section.  Indeed, the last written words of his, addressed to the public, were words in defence of the race to whose freedom he had devoted his life—­words which, trumpet-tongued raised anew the rallying-cry of “Liberty and equal rights for each, for all, and for ever, wherever the lot of man is cast within our broad domains!”

True to his grand motto “My country is the world! my countrymen are all mankind,” he espoused the cause of the Chinese, and denounced the National policy of excluding them on the ground of race from the republic but a few months before his death.  The anti-Chinese movement appeared to him “narrow, conceited, selfish, anti-human, anti-Christian.”  “Against this hateful spirit of caste,” wrote the dying philanthropist, “I have earnestly protested for the last fifty years, wherever it has developed itself, especially in the case of another class, for many generations still more contemned, degraded, and oppressed; and the time has fully come to deal with it as an offence to God, and a curse to the world wherever it seeks to bear sway.”

On the same grand principle of human fraternity Mr. Garrison dealt with the questions of trade and tariffs also.  He believed in liberty, civil, religious, and commercial.  He was in fact a radical free trader on moral and humanitary grounds.  “He is the most sagacious political economist,” was a remark of his, “who contends for the highest justice, the most far-reaching equality, a close adherence to natural laws, and the removal of all those restrictions which foster national pride and selfishness.”  And here is another like unto it:  “Believing that the interests of the American people in no wise materially differ from those of the people of any other country, and denying the rectitude or feasibility of building ourselves up at their expense by an exclusive policy, obstructing the natural flow of material exchanges, I avow myself to be a radical free trader, even to the extent of desiring the abolition of all custom-houses, as now constituted, throughout the world.  That event is far distant, undoubtedly, but I believe it will come with the freedom and enlightenment of mankind.  My faith is absolute that it will prove advantageous to every branch of industry, whether at home or abroad.”