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[104]

Before passing to a consideration of these remarks of “Ion,” let me say a word in relation to Mr. Emerson. I do not consider him as indorsing any of these criticisms on the Abolitionists. His services to the most radical antislavery movement have been generous and marked. He has never shrunk from any odium which lending his name and voice to it would incur. Making fair allowance for his peculiar taste, habits, and genius, he has given a generous amount of aid to the antislavery movement, and never let its friends want his cordial “God-speed.”

“ Ion's” charges are the old ones, that we Abolitionists are hurting our own cause,--that, instead of waiting for the community to come up to our views, and endeavoring to remove prejudice and enlighten ignorance by patient explanation and fair argument, we fall at once, like children, to abusing everything and everybody,--that we imagine zeal will supply the place of common sense,--that we have never shown any sagacity in adapting our means to our ends, have never studied the national character, or attempted to make use of the materials which lay all about us to influence public opinion, but by blind, childish, obstinate fury and indiscriminate denunciation, have become “honestly impotent, and conscientious hinderances.”

These, Sir, are the charges which have uniformly been brought against all reformers in all ages. “Ion” thinks the same faults are chargeable on the leaders of all the “popular movements” in England, which, he says, “are led by heroes who fear nothing and who win nothing.” If the leaders of popular movements in Great Britain for the last fifty years have been losers, I should be curious to know what party, in “Ion's” opinion, have won? My Lord Derby and his friends seem to think Democracy has made, and is making, dangerous headway. If the men who, by popular agitation, outside of Parliament, wrung

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