John Jay Chapman, William Lloyd Garrison

[141] the Constitution of Switzerland or of Patagonia. But, for some reason, our own Constitution was regarded differently. I suppose that the politics, theology, and formal organization of the whole world are never so important as they pretend to be. The element of material interest in these matters gives them their awful weight to contemporaries. When we are dealing with a past age this element evaporates, and we see clearly that most of the importances of the world have no claim to our reverence. Now when a man has felt in this way about his own age, we call him a great man; because we agree with him. For this is the test, and the only conceivable test of greatness-that a man shall look upon his own age, and see it in the same light as that in which posterity sees it. We must concede greatness to Garrison. His early editorials upon the question of disunion show that he viewed our Constitution in true historical perspective as early as 1832.

Let us now remember some of the phases of the nightmare which, like a continuous Dreyfus case, perplexed all honest men, all thinking men in America for two generations. The Constitution was so inwoven with our social life that the conflict between