John Jay Chapman, William Lloyd Garrison

[138] which criticized them. Massachusetts and South Carolina were parts of that modern world in which their heart-strings met. This solidarity between the North and the South was the cause of the anguish, and the means of the cure.

In the early days of any movement it is only the expert who can read the times correctly. The lean prophet, in whose bosom the turmoil of a new age begins, sees proofs of that age everywhere. He thinks of nothing else, he cares for nothing else. Thus the Abolitionists could see in 1830 what the average man could not understand till 1845--that the Slave Power was a Moloch which controlled the politics of the North and which, in the nature of things, could stick at nothing while engaged in perpetuating that control. Garrison or May could perceive this in 1828 by taking an observation of Edward Everett or of Daniel Webster. But the average citizen could not see it; he lacked the detachment. His obfuscation was a part of the problem, a part of the evil in the period. In 1845 it required the Annexation of Texas to show to the man in the street those same truths which the Abolitionists had seen so plainly fifteen years before. The Annexation of