Francis Jackson Garrison, William Lloyd Garrison, 1805-1879; the story of his life told by his children: volume 4

One more meeting awaited him, at which, with no expectation on his part, he was the principal figure, and his speech the chief feature of the occasion. This was a general Conference, held the day before he left London,¹ of the various Associations for the repeal of the Contagious Diseases Acts, representatives from all parts of the kingdom being present. The slow and painful fight with legalized vice and iniquity had now been going on for eight years, and the small number of faithful women and men who had borne the heat and the burden of this battle for the protection of womanhood, and the honor and dignity of manhood, for social purity and the equal accountability of the sexes to the moral law, met to take counsel together. The discouragements and reverses had been many. The clergy as a body had hesitated to take up a question presenting so many revolting aspects, and from the very mention and discussion of which timid and sensitive natures shrank; the press, especially the large dailies, treated it with deliberate and systematic silence; and Parliament steadily refused to repeal the law. Meetings held now and then in different cities and towns, but usually unreported; tracts and documents, petitions and appeals, scattered broadcast, seemed to produce little impression on the public, and still less on Parliament, which appointed Royal Commissions of Inquiry, but went no further. A deep seriousness pervaded the hundred earnest men and women who now came together, and an almost overpowering sense of the magnitude of their task and the formidable obstacles yet to be overcome seemed to rest upon them.

William Shaen,² a long-time friend of Mr. Garrison, presided, and, after giving a clear and able summary of their past labors and the present position of the movement, and introducing Professor James Stuart and Sir Harcourt Johnstone (the latter the Parliamentary leader