reformer denied their right of property in the slave, he attacked their character also, held them up in their relation of masters to the reprobation of the nation and of mankind as monsters of injustice and inhumanity.  The tone which he held toward them, steadily, without shadow of change, was the tone of a righteous man toward the workers of iniquity.  The indifference, the apathy, the pro-slavery sympathy and prejudice of the free States rendered the people of the North hardly less culpable.  They were working iniquity with the people of the South.  This was the long, sharp goad, which the young editor thrust in between the bars of the Union and stirred the guilty sections to quick and savage outbursts of temper against him and the bitter truths which he preached.  Almost directly the proofs came to him that he was HEARD at the South and at the North alike.  Angry growls reached his ears in the first month of the publication of the Liberator from some heartless New England editors in denunciation of his “violent and intemperate attacks on slaveholders.”  The Journal, published at Louisville, Kentucky, and edited by George D. Prentice, declared that, “some of his opinions with regard to slavery in the United States are no better than lunacy.”  The American Spectator published at the seat of the National Government, had hoped that the good sense of the “late talented and persecuted junior editor” of the Genius, “would erelong withdraw him even from the side of the Abolitionists.”  And from farther South the growl which the reformer heard was unmistakably ferocious.  It was from the State of South Carolina and the Camden Journal, which pronounced the Liberator “a scandalous and incendiary budget of sedition.”  These were the beginning of the chorus of curses, which soon were to sing their serpent songs about his head.  Profane and abusive letters from irate slaveholders and their Northern sympathisers began to pour into the sanctum of the editor.  Within a few months after the first issue of the Liberator the whole aspect of the world without had changed toward him.  “Foes are on my right hand, and on my left,” he reported to some friends.  “The tongue of detraction is busy against me.  I have no communion with the world—­the world none with me.  The timid, the lukewarm, the base, affect to believe that my brains are disordered, and my words the ravings of a maniac.  Even many of my friends—­they who have grown up with me from my childhood—­are transformed into scoffers and enemies.”  The apathy of the press, and the apathy of the people were putting forth signs that the long winter of the land was passing away.