Francis Jackson Garrison, William Lloyd Garrison, 1805-1879; the story of his life told by his children: volume 2

As a definition, this does not help matters much, even when illumined by the fact that both Perfectionism and Transcendentalism, as applied to the conduct of life, led up to socialism—the Oneida Community and Brook Farm. The passage just quoted, however, does bear upon the charge of fanaticism already brought by Elizur Wright against Mr. Garrison. No one has accused Dr. Channing of being a fanatic because he gave the initial¹ impulse to the Brook Farm experiment. Nobody saw fanaticism in that portion of his letter to the abolitionists in which he said: ‘The liberation of three millions of² slaves is indeed a noble object; but a greater work is the diffusion of principles by which every yoke is to be broken, every government to be regenerated, and a liberty more precious than civil or political is to be secured to the world.’ This, coming a week after Mr. Garrison's prospectus, sounds like a plagiarism, or, regarded as (what it was meant to be) an exhortation and a rebuke, like a jest. So does the patronizing repetition of the idea a few periods later:

I am not discouraged by the fact that this great truth³ [‘the unutterable worth of every human being’] has been espoused most earnestly by a party which numbers in its ranks few great names. . . . The less prosperous classes furnish the world with its reformers and martyrs. These, however, from imperfect culture, are apt to narrow themselves to one idea,⁴ to fasten their eyes on a single evil, to lose the balance of their minds, to kindle with a feverish enthusiasm. Let such remember that no man should take on himself the office of a reformer whose zeal in a particular cause is not tempered by extensive sympathies and universal love.⁵