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

had mustered as¹ many clerical politicians as possible to harangue the people of the Tenth District, in opposition to the claims of Mr. Borden. . . . There were Rev. Messrs. Torrey, Cummings, Lee, Phelps, Denison, Leavitt,--all in a row! We believe “the business of a politician” to be a very poor and paltry one, and the less a minister of the gospel has to do with it, the better. Is there one man in the United States—in the whole world who can honestly and truly affirm, before God, that by becoming a politician he has improved his manners or morals, his head or his heart, or has elevated the tone of his piety, or felt new emotions of spiritual life? If so, we have yet to see that man. Are there not thousands of good men who have a far different confession to make?

A further distinction between the new anti-slavery method and the old, and a very significant one, lay in the fact that the Liberty Party necessarily divorced itself from that foreign philanthropic alliance which Mr. Garrison had established in 1833. A Thompson coming over to speak for it, and to help elect its candidates, from coroner to President, and to promote its policy with reference to the Constitution and laws on the subject of slavery, would have exposed himself to national and popular resentment which would not have been without excuse. This was what Thompson himself,² Stuart, and Cropper had deprecated. The sending over of material assistance, ‘British gold,’ would have aroused yet livelier hostility to the new party. The abolitionists, on the other hand, continued to draw upon the moral sympathy of the world for objects which remained purely moral. Their funds were recruited as before on both sides of the Atlantic, and their national organ was sustained largely by the proceeds of goods furnished annually from Great Britain, and disposed of at the anti-slavery bazaars. The chapters which are to follow will show how indispensable this international cooperation was.

On the assumption that the Liberty Party was the progenitor of the Republican Party which gave the