John Jay Chapman, William Lloyd Garrison

[272] instance, this very man, William Lloyd Garrison, is almost forgotten among us. He lived a life of heroism and of practical achievement; the beauty of his whole course was extraordinary, and his type of character is very rare. Had he lived in Europe he would have been classified at once among the great figures of his own generation. Indeed he was so classified from across the sea. His character would have been prized thereafter as a national possession. But in America all that the educated man of to-day knows of Garrison is that he was one who held impractical views and used over-strong language during the Anti-slavery struggle.

All this feebleness, whose evidences I have been reviewing, comes, I believe, from a central deficiency of life in the American people. It is not a thing which can be cured in the college, or in the school, or in the drawing-room; though the cure will show in all such places as fast as the great patient improves.

During the very epoch (the decade succeeding the close of the war) when our intellectual blight was at its worst, there began to appear among us compassionate persons founding newsboys' halls in the Five Points, prison angels, and police court