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so great and dazzling that we had never dared to hope for it, and should have regarded him who had predicted it to us as sanguine beyond the bounds of mental sanity.
So has it been with Mr. Garrison.
(Loud cheers.)
The Address having been unanimously adopted by the audience,
Mr. Garrison rose to acknowledge it amid an enthusiastic ovation.
Not anticipating that he was to encounter such a greeting from the foremost men of intellect in
Great Britain, he had made small preparation for his part of the programme, and, with the exception of jotting down a few notes as heads of what he wished to say, he went trusting to the inspiration of the moment.
His opening words, spoken under perceptible embarrassment, and with unaffected modesty and feeling, were listened to with the closest attention:
Mr. Chairman, Ladies and Gentlemen: For this marked1 expression of your personal respect, and appreciation of my labors in the cause of human freedom, and of your esteem and friendship for the land of my nativity, I offer you, one and all, my grateful acknowledgments.
But I am so profoundly impressed by the formidable array of rank, genius, intellect, scholarship, and moral and religious worth which I see before me, that I fear I shall not be able to address you, except with a fluttering pulse and a stammering tongue.
For me this is, indeed, an anomalous position!
Assuredly, this is treatment with which I have not been very familiar!
For more than thirty years I had to look the fierce and unrelenting hostility of my countrymen in the face, with few to cheer me onward.
In all the South I was an outlaw, and could not have gone there, though an American citizen guiltless of wrong, and though that flag [here the speaker pointed to the United States ensign] had been over my head, except at the peril of my life; nay, with the certainty of finding a bloody grave.
(Hear, hear.) In all the North I was looked upon with hatred and contempt.
The whole nation, subjugated to the awful power of slavery, rose up in mobocratic tumult against any and every effort to liberate the millions held in bondage on its soil.
And yet I demanded nothing that was not perfectly just and reasonable— in exact accordance with the Declaration of Independence and the Golden Rule.
I was not the enemy of any man living.
I
