[52]
record Garrison's insensibility to the claims of the working classes outside the ranks of the slaves.
Their condition was placed before him by a correspondent in 1875, but it did not appeal to him. He seemed to think that the ballot (which, by the way, he considered it wrong to make use of) was an all-sufficient remedy for their ills, and that the laboring man held his fate in his own hands.
“You express the conviction,” he adds, “that the present relation of capital to labor is ‘hastening the nation to its ruin,’ and that if some remedy is not applied it is difficult to see ‘how a bloody struggle is to be prevented!’
I entertain no such fears.
Our danger lies in sensual indulgence, in a licentious perversion of liberty, in the prevalence of intemperance, and in whatever tends to the demoralization of the people.”
In the same strain might a Southern planter have answered Lundy in the twenties!
Garrison was only a fallible mortal after all, but surely he had already deserved well enough of his kind for us to overlook the natural conservatism of his old age. It is not everyone that can preserve to the end the freshness and alertness of vision of his youth, a quality which distinguished Wendell Phillips from his colleagues and outweighed the trivial defects of his character.
The workingman, it should be said in this
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