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[470] make an issue and necessitate a conflict of two civilizations. Calhoun said, Slavery is right. Webster and Clay shrunk from him and evaded his assertion. Garrison, alone at that time, met him face to face, proclaiming slavery a sin and daring all the inferences. It is true, as New Orleans complains to-day in her journals, that this man brought upon America everything they call the disaster of the last twenty years; and it is equally true that if you seek through the hidden causes and unheeded events for the hand that wrote “emancipation” on the statute-book and on the flag, it lies still there to-day.

I have no time to number the many kindred reforms to which he lent as profound an earnestness and almost as large aid.

I hardly dare enter that home. There is one other marked and, as it seems to me, unprecedented element in this career. His was the happiest life I ever saw. No need for pity. Let no tear fall over his life. No man gathered into his bosom a fuller sheaf of blessing, delight, and joy. In his seventy years there were not arrows enough in the whole quiver of the Church or State to wound him. As Guizot once said from the tribune, “Gentlemen, you cannot get high enough to reach the level of my contempt.” So Garrison, from the serene level of his daily life, from the faith that never faltered, was able to say to American hate, “You cannot reach up to the level of my home mood, my daily existence.” I have seen him intimately for thirty years, while raining on his head was the hate of the community, when by every possible form of expression malignity let him know that it wished him all sorts of harm. I never saw him unhappy; I never saw the moment that serene, abounding faith in the rectitude of his motive, the soundness of his method, and the certainty

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William Lloyd Garrison (2)
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