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which, it is declared, is enough to exhaust your strength and fully to absorb your time.
The acme of impudence is reached by your eulogists in denouncing me, in the same breath, for seeing but one object, having but one idea, and making the liberation of the slave the one great object of my life!
So that what in you excites their highest approval and admiration, in me fills them with extreme disgust and righteous displeasure!
How just, impartial, magnanimous is such a spirit!
Says the Boston Pilot: “Father Mathew sagaciously and properly refused, saying that his own slavery-abolitionism was enough for his powers.”
Says the same journal: “Why does Mr. Garrison suppose that the slavery of the American blacks is the only great evil, or devil, to be cast out of modern civilization?
Why do his sympathies run rabid in one direction?” . . . And so on to the end of the list.
All this is highly consistent—is it not?
What renders it particularly ludicrous and audacious is the fact, that you allow your mind no scope as to other reforms, while I have never hesitated to countenance and aid a great variety, comprehending the rights and interests of the whole human family.
I have not hesitated to grapple with any system of iniquity, however gigantic or hoary, whether pertaining to the Church or the State.
I am constantly stigmatized as an “antichurch and ministry, anti-Sabbath, woman's-rights, non-resistance, no-government man,” aside from the odium that is heaped upon me as an abolitionist.
This implies something of a discursive spirit of reform!
The fifth letter concluded as follows:
Consider, now, what must be the effect of your example1 on the minds of your countrymen in the United States, whose number is at least as great as that of the slave population.
Will they not feel justified in disregarding all the injunctions contained in your Address?
Will they not consider you as virtually condemning the abolitionists, and all agitation of the subject of slavery?
Hitherto, their prejudices against our free colored population have been peculiarly bitter; will they not be rendered even more inimical to that persecuted class by your apparent lack of sympathy?
How can you ever consistently enjoin upon them again the duty to use all their moral and political power for the abolition of slavery, and to unite with the friends and advocates of immediate emancipation in one common effort?
If you can find reasons to stand aloof from this question, will it be a difficult matter for them to do the
