Francis Jackson Garrison, William Lloyd Garrison, 1805-1879; the story of his life told by his children: volume 3

[334] dissatisfied with his long absence beyond the reopening of Parliament. He pleaded the pressing engagements thrust upon him, his accepting to-day ‘invitations for to-morrow, reluctant, when the fields were white unto the harvest, to quit them without putting in the sickle, and gathering something more into the garner of human liberty’; his resolve to vindicate free speech in his own person. ‘I am convinced,’ he said, “that, measuring the .comparative value of my labors, not by the limits of this borough, nor by the limits of these islands, but by the limits of the globe itself and of the human race, I was doing, and did do, a work in America which I could not have accomplished to the same extent elsewhere.” Tower Hamlets.

Allow me to say, that had I remained for ease, leisure,¹ emolument, recreation, I should have condemned myself before I had appeared to receive your censure. I was not botanizing on the Himalayas; I was not pursuing antiquarian researches on the banks of the Nile; I was not gazing upon the sublimities of the Alps or the Andes; I was not putting my legs under the tables of the bloated planters of the South, or truckling politicians of the North, of America. I was facing labors, perils, persecutions, and obloquy, in the cause of the most oppressed and degraded of the human race. . . .

Of all institutions of personal slavery, looked at in connection with its safeguards and its origin,—of all the institutions of slavery on the face of the earth, there are none so unmitigatedly bad, so inexcusably atrocious, so colossal in their felonious aspect, so diametrically opposed to the professions and practices of the people that encourage and support them, as the institution of slavery in the United States of America. There is no republicanism in America while slavery exists. The cause of liberty throughout the world is maimed and bleeding while slavery exists there. We preach Democracy in vain in England while a Tory and Conservative can point us to the opposite side of the Atlantic, and say: “There are 19,000,000 of the human race, free, absolutely; every man heir-apparent to the throne; governing themselves—the government of all, by all, for all; but, instead of being a consistent republic, it is one wide-spread confederacy of free men for the enslavement of an entire nation of another complexion.” While that institution lasts, the experiment of men to govern themselves has not been proved to be