At this period he tested the disposition of slaveholders to manumit their slaves.  The Colonization Society had given it out that there was no little desire on the part of many masters to set their slaves free.  All that was wanted for a practical demonstration in this direction was the assurance of free transportation out of the country for the emancipated slaves.  Lundy had made arrangement for the transportation of fifty slaves to Hayti and their settlement in that country.  So he and Garrison advertised this fact in the Genius, but they waited in vain for a favorable response from the South—­notwithstanding the following humane inducement which this advertisement offered:  “THE PRICE OF PASSAGE WILL BE ADVANCED, and everything furnished of which they may stand in need, until they shall have time to prepare their houses and set in to work.”  No master was moved to take advantage of the opportunity.  This was discouraging to the believers in the efficacy of colonization as a potent anti-slavery instrument.  But Garrison was no such believer.  With unerring moral instinct he had from the start placed his reliance “on nothing but the eternal principles of justice for the speedy overthrow of slavery.”

He obtained at this period an intimate personal knowledge of the free colored people.  He saw that they were not essentially unlike other races—­that there was nothing morally or intellectually peculiar about them, and that the evil or the good which they manifested was the common property of mankind in similar circumstances.  He forthwith became their brave defender against the common slanders of the times.  “There is a prevalent disposition among all classes to traduce the habits and morals of our free blacks,” he remarked in the Genius.  “The most scandalous exaggerations in regard to their condition are circulated by a thousand mischievous tongues, and no reproach seems to them too deep or unmerited.  Vile and malignant indeed is this practice, and culpable are they who follow it.  We do not pretend to say that crime, intemperance, and suffering, to a considerable extent, cannot be found among the free blacks; but we do assert that they are as moral, peaceable, and industrious as that class of the whites who are, like them, in indigent circumstances—­and far less intemperate than the great body of foreign immigrants who infest and corrupt our shores.”  This idea of the natural equality of the races he presented in the Genius a few weeks before with Darwinian breadth in the following admirable sentences:  “I deny the postulate that God has made, by an irreversible decree, or any inherent qualities, one portion of the human race superior to another.  No matter how many breeds are amalgamated—­no matter how many shades of color intervene between tribes or nations give them the same chances to improve, and a fair start at the same time, and the result will be equally brilliant, equally productive, equally grand.”