Ernest Crosby, Garrison the non-resistant

[85] truth; but fortunately he found a particular cause, completely in harmony with his highest'conceptions, and yet ripe for action. Without abating a tittle of his beliefs, he threw himself heart and soul into the struggle for emancipation.

In considering that struggle we are brought face to face at once with the anomaly that the cause fathered by a non-resistant was at last achieved by the greatest war of history. Does not this dispose of all the claims of the doctrine of abstention from violence? Was not non-resistance impotent until men who believed in bloodshed, gun-powder and cold iron came to its assistance? Is not physical force the true remedy for such evils as slavery after all? I think not. Garrison had just one thing to accomplish and that was to make slavery intolerable, and this he succeeded in doing. When it had once become intolerable, it was doomed; but the method of its abolition was a matter of choice in which he was overruled. He has been blamed from the standpoint of non-resistance because he did not continue to protest against the war, and did not dissociate himself more distinctly from its methods. It has been urged against him that when a young friend who had obtained a commission in the army came to bid him farewell in uniform, Garrison slapped him on the back and wished him