the first quarter of the nineteenth century, meanwhile, the condition of industry in the South had tended to stimulate the institution in that region until it assumed unforeseen social and economic importance. Throughout colonial history there had been considerable theoretical objection to it, a line of American thought which may be adequately traced by consulting the index of Stedman and Hutchinson's "Library of American Literature." Samuel Sewall opposed slavery; so from the beginning did the Quakers; and even in the South itself there were plenty of people who saw its evils and hoped for its disappearance; but no thoroughly organised movement against it took place until the air of New England freshened with the spirit of its Renaissance.

Channing, who passed the years from 1798 to 1800 in Richmond, wrote from thence a letter which strikingly expresses the feeling excited by slavery in earnest Unitarians:

"There is one object here which always depresses me. It is slavery. This alone would prevent me from ever settling in Virginia. Language cannot express my detestation of it. Master and slave! Nature never made such a distinction, or established such a relation. Man, when forced to substitute the will of another for his own, ceases to be a moral agent; his title to the name of man is extinguished, he becomes a mere machine in the hands of his oppressor. No empire is so valuable as the empire of one's self. No right is so inseparable from humanity, and so necessary to the improvement of our species, as the right of exerting the powers which nature has given us in the pursuit of any and of every good which we can obtain without doing injury to others. Should you desire it, I will give you some idea of the situation and character of the negroes in Virginia. It is a subject so degrading to humanity that I cannot dwell on it with pleasure. I should be obliged to show you every vice, heightened by every meanness and added to every misery. The influence of slavery on the

whites is almost as fatal as on the blacks themselves."

To Channing, the conclusion here stated was unavoidable. If human beings are essentially good, they have a natural right to free development. No form of environment could more impede such development than lifelong slavery. When any

honest Unitarian was brought face to face with slavery, then, he was confronted with a dilemma. Either this thing was a monstrous denial of fundamental truth, or else the negroes were not human. Something like the latter view was certainly held by many good people. In the South, indeed, it became almost axiomatic. In Mark Twain's "Huckleberry Finn" there is an admirably compact expression of this temper. A boy, drawing the long bow, tells a simple-hearted and charitable woman that the boiler of a steamer has just exploded.

"Good gracious!' she exclaims, 'anybody hurt?'

"No, 'm. Killed a nigger.'

"Well, it's lucky; because sometimes people do get hurt.""

With which sigh of relief the good creature goes on to relate some melancholy experiences of the boy's Uncle Silas.

It is hardly extreme to say, however, that this opinion is more consonant with New England temper to-day than it was seventy years ago. Modern ethnology seems to recognise a pretty marked distinction between human beings in the Stone Age and human beings as developed into the civilisation of the nineteenth century; and though native Africans are not literally neolithic, they certainly linger far behind the social stage which has been reached by modern Europe or America. To philanthropic people in 1830, on the other hand, the distinction between Caucasians and Africans seemed literally a question of complexion. Men they believed to be incarnate souls; and the colour which a soul happened to assume they held a mere accident.

Accordingly, a full nine years before the foundation of the "Dial," there was unflinchingly established in Boston a newspaper, which until the close of the Civil War remained the official organ of the New England antislavery men. This was the "Liberator," founded in 1831 by William Lloyd Garrison, then only twenty-six years old. Born of the poorer classes

at Newburyport in 1805, by trade a printer, by temperament an uncompromising reformer, he was stirred from youth by a deep conviction that slavery must be uprooted. When he founded the "Liberator," he had already made himself conspicuous; but the educated classes thought him insignificant. In 1833 he was a principal founder of the Antislavery Society in Philadelphia. From that time, the movement strengthened. Garrison died in 1879. For the last fifteen years of his life he was held, as he is held by tradition, a great national hero, a man who stood for positive right, who won his cause, who deserves unquestioning admiration, and whose opponents merit equally unquestioning contempt.

So complete a victory has rarely been the lot of any earthly reformer, and there are aspects in which Garrison deserves all the admiration accorded to his memory. Fanatical, of course, he was absolutely sincere in his fanaticism, absolutely devoted and absolutely brave. What is more, he is to be distinguished from most Americans who in his earlier days. had attained eminence and influence by the fact that he never had the advantage or limit, as you will, of such educational training as should enable him to see more than one side of a question. The greatest strength of an honest, uneducated reformer lies in his unquestioning singleness of view. He really believes those who oppose him to be as wicked as he believes himself to be good. What moral strength is inherent in congenitally blind conviction is surely and honourably his.

But because Garrison was honest, brave, and strenuous, and because long before his life closed, the movement to which he unreservedly gave his energy proved triumphant, it does not follow that the men who opposed him were wicked. To understand the temper of the conservative people of New England we must stop for a moment, and see how slavery presented itself to them during the years of the antislavery struggle.

In the first place, the institution of slavery was honestly

regarded by many people as one phase of the more comprehensive institution which really lies at the basis of modern civilisation; namely, property. Property in any form involves deprivation. Property in land, for example, deprives many human beings of access to many portions of the earth, and still more of liberty to cultivate it and to enjoy the fruits of their labours. Property in corporations involves the payment of interest to those who possess capital, and this payment certainly impresses many worthy labouring men as wantonly subtracted from their earnings. So in our own day we have seen many honest attacks on property, not only in land, but in every form of corporations. Once for all, we may admit that there is some ground for these moral crusades. So far as property involves deprivation and incidentally results in grinding hardships, property involves evil. On the other hand, it always involves a great deal of good. Take, for example, not private persons whose incomes exceed their actual needs, but public institutions which are unquestioningly regarded as vitally important to the general welfare, such as universities or libraries. To do their service to learning and wisdom, these need incomes. They must possess investments which shall return a certain annual percentage; otherwise their work must stop. Very good is the suffering and inequality involved in property, when property takes the form of land or shares, an evil so serious as to counterbalance the good done to civilisation by institutions of learning? Some admirable people, holding property essentially wrong, declare that it is; most men of hard sense, who may be taken as a type of the conservative classes, maintain the contrary.

The conviction that slavery, whatever its evils, was really a form of property, and that an attack on slavery therefore involved a general attack on the whole basis of civilisation, was one of the strongest convictions of conservative New England. In many minds which abhorred the evils of slavery, furthermore, this conviction was strengthened by an equally honest one that

The

when you have made a bargain you should stick to it. Constitution of the United States was presenting itself more and more in the light of an agreement between two incompatible sets of economic institutions, assuring to each the right freely to exist within its own limits. The fact that as a man of business you have given a note to some one whose personal morals you believe deplorable, is no reason why your note should not be paid. Among the conservative classes of New England, then, the antislavery movement seemed as threatening to the Union as to property itself. Whatever threatened Union or property, they conceived, clearly threatened civilisation, and on civilisation rests all that is best in human life or human society; for civilisation is the mother of ideals.

A third consideration, also, had great weight among thoughtful people. During the French Revolution the negroes of the French colonies in the West Indies had effected the triumphant insurrection which resulted in the still existing republics of San Domingo and Hayti; and in 1830 there were gentlemen in New England who personally remembered the horrors of that tragic time. The blacks had risen in overwhelming numbers; white males they had slaughtered; their wives and daughters, often women educated under the gentlest influences of France during the Old Régime, they had done to death more cruelly still. To cite a single instance, recorded by a Boston gentleman who escaped from San Domingo with his life: "The women, old and young, were collected together on the floor of a church about twelve or fifteen miles from the Cape, where many of them fortunately died under the brutality to which they were subjected." Something of the same kind, on a very small scale, has lately resulted in that deplorable lynching of Southern negroes which so puzzles unthinking Northern minds. To the conservative classes of old New England, in short, to the men whom Gilbert Stuart had painted, and their sons, the antislavery movement not only meant an attack on property, the institution on which civilisa