He seems to have understood,- this boy without experience, he seems to have understood by instinct that righteousness is the only thing which will finally compel submission; that one, with God, is always a majority. He seems to have known it at the very outset, taught of God, the herald and champion, God-endowed and God-sent to arouse a nation, that only by the most absolute assertion of the uttermost truth, without qualification or compromise, can a nation be waked to conscience or strengthened for duty. No man ever understood so thoroughly not O'Connell nor Cobden - the nature and deeds of that agitation which alone, in our day, reforms states. In the darkest hour he never doubted the omnipotence of conscience and the moral sentiment.

And then look at the unquailing courage with which he faced the successive obstacles that confronted him! Modest, believing at the outset that America could not be as corrupt as she seemed, he waits at the door of the churches, importunes leading clergymen, begs for a voice from the sanctuary, a consecrated protest from the pulpit. To his utter amazement, he learns, by thus probing it, that the Church will give him no help, but, on the contrary, surges into the movement in opposition. Serene, though astounded by the unexpected revelation, he simply turns his footsteps, and announces that "a Christianity which keeps peace with the oppressor is no Christianity," and goes on his way to supplant the religious element which the Church had allied with sin by a deeper religious faith.

Yes, he sets himself to work this stripling with his sling confronting the angry giant in complete steel, this solitary evangelist to make Christians of twenty millions of people! I am not exaggerating. You know, older men, who can go back to that period; I know that when one, kindred to a voice

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that you have heard to-day, whose pathway Garrison's bloody feet had made easier for the treading, when he uttered in a pulpit in Boston only a few strong words, injected in the course of a sermon, his venerable father, between seventy and eighty years, was met the next morning and his hand shaken by a much moved friend. "Colonel, you have my sympathy. I cannot tell you how much I pity you." What," said the brusque old man, "what is your pity?" "Well, I hear your son went crazy at 'Church Green' yesterday." Such was the utter indifference. At that time bloody feet had smoothed the pathway for other men to tread. Still, then and for years afterwards, insanity was the only kind-hearted excuse that partial friends could find for sympathy with such a madman!

If anything strikes one more prominently than another in this career, to your astonishment, young men, you may say,

it is the plain, sober common sense, the robust English element which underlay Cromwell, which explains Hampden, which gives the color that distinguishes 1640 in England from 1790 in France. Plain, robust, well-balanced common sense. Nothing erratic; no enthusiasm which had lost its hold on firm earth; no mistake of method; no unmeasured confidence; no miscalculation of the enemy's strength. Whoever mistook, Garrison seldom mistook.

Fewer mistakes in that long agitation of fifty years can be charged to his account than to any other American. Erratic as men supposed him, intemperate in utterance, mad in judgment, an enthusiast gone crazy, the moment you sat down at his side, patient in explanation, clear in statement, sound in judgment, studying carefully every step, calculating every assault, measuring the force to meet it, never in haste, always patient, waiting until the time ripened,- fit for a great leader. Cull, if you please, from the statesmen who obeyed

him, whom he either whipped into submission or summoned into existence,- cull from among them the man whose career, fairly examined, exhibits fewer miscalculations and fewer mistakes than this career which is just ended.

I know what I claim. As Mr. Weld has said, I am speaking to-day to men who judge by their ears, by rumors; who see, not with their eyes, but with their prejudices. History, fifty years hence, dispelling your prejudices, will do justice to the grand sweep of the orbit which, as my friend said, to-day we are hardly in a position, or mood, to measure. As Coleridge avers, "The truth-haters of to-morrow will give the right name to the truth-haters of to-day, for even such men the stream of time bears onward." I do not fear that, if my words are remembered by the next generation, they will be thought unsupported or extravagant. When history seeks the sources of New England character, when men begin to open up and examine the hidden springs and note the convulsions and the throes of American life within the last half century, they will remember Parker, that Jupiter of the pulpit; they will remember the long unheeded but measureless influence that came to us from the seclusion of Concord; they will do justice to the masterly statesmanship which guided, during a part of his life, the efforts of Webster. But they will recognize that there was only one man north of Mason and Dixon's line who met squarely, with an absolute logic, the else impreg nable position of John C. Calhoun; only one brave, farsighted, keen, logical intellect, which discerned that there were only two moral points in the universe, right and wrong; that, when one was asserted, subterfuge and evasion would be sure to end in defeat.

Here lies the brain and the heart; here lies the statesmanlike intellect, logical as Jonathan Edwards, brave as Luther,

which confronted the logic of South Carolina with an assertion direct and broad enough to make an issue and necessitate a conflict of two civilizations. Calhoun said, slavery is right. Webster and Clay shrunk from him, and evaded his assertion.. Garrison, alone at that time, met him face to face, proclaiming slavery a sin and daring all the inferences. It is true, as New Orleans complains to-day in her journals, that this man brought upon America everything they call the disaster of the last twenty years; and it is equally true that, if you seek through the hidden causes and unheeded events for the hand. that wrote "emancipation" on the statute book and on the flag, it lies still there to-day.

I have no time to number the many kindred reforms to which he lent as profound an earnestness and almost as large aid.

I hardly dare enter that home. There is one other marked and, as it seems to me, unprecedented, element in this career. His was the happiest life I ever saw. No need for pity. Let no tear fall over his life. No man gathered into his bosom a fuller sheaf of blessing, delight, and joy. In his seventy years there were not arrows enough in the whole quiver of the Church or State to wound him. As Guizot once said from the tribune, "Gentlemen, you cannot get high enough to reach the level of my contempt." So Garrison, from the serene level of his daily life, from the faith that never faltered, was able to say to American hate, "You cannot reach up to the level of my home mood, my daily existence." I have seen him intimately for thirty years, while raining on his head was the hate of the community, when by every possible form of expression malignity let him know that it wished him all sorts of harm. I never saw him unhappy. I never saw the moment that serene, abounding faith in the rectitude of his motive, the

soundness of his method, and the certainty of his success did not lift him above all possibility of being reached by any clamor about him. Every one of his near friends will agree with me that this was the happiest life God has granted in our day to any American standing in the foremost rank of influence and effort.

Adjourned from the stormiest meeting, where hot debate had roused all his powers as near to anger as his nature ever let him come, the music of a dozen voices even of those who had just opposed him or a piano, if the house held one, changed his mood in an instant, and made the hour laugh with more than content; unless, indeed, a baby and playing with it proved metal even more attractive.

To champion wearisome causes, bear with disordered intellects, to shelter the wrecks of intemperance and fugitives whose pulse trembled at every touch on the door-latch,- this was his home. Keenly alive to human suffering, ever prompt to help relieve it, pouring out his means for that more lavishly than he ought, all this was no burden, never clouded or depressed the inextinguishable buoyancy and gladness of his God ever held over him unclouded the sunlight of his countenance.

nature.

And he never grew old. The tabernacle of flesh grew feebler, and the step was less elastic. But the ability to work, the serene faith and unflagging hope, suffered no change. To the day of his death he was as ready as in his boyhood to confront and defy a mad majority. The keen insight and clear judgment never failed him. His tenacity of purpose never weakened. He showed nothing either of the intellectual sluggishness or the timidity of age. The bugle-call which last year woke the nation to its peril and duty on the Southern question showed all the old fitness to lead and