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[125] both,1 but it was finally decided to increase the price of each, and try to prolong their individual existence until the passage and ratification of the Amendment should warrant their discontinuance. To Oliver Johnson, who had strongly urged their union, on the ground that Mr. Garrison would thus be relieved of the toil of the printing-office, and could, by editorial correspondence with the Standard, easily satisfy the Liberator subscribers, whose interest in the paper was largely personal to him, the latter wrote:

I am not insensible to the compliment intended to be2 conveyed in the assurance, that it is what I write that alone interests the readers of the Liberator; but I am not willing to believe, after an editorial experience of thirty-eight years, that, aside from my own lucubrations, I have neither the tact nor the talent to make an interesting journal. This touches me too closely. If the Liberator has been at all effective in the past, it has been owing to its completeness, as a whole, from week to week, and not to what I have written. This is the true value of every journal. My selections have cost me much labor, and they have been made with all possible discrimination as to their interest, ability, and appositeness. The amount of communicated original matter has always been much larger than that of the Standard; and though not always of special interest or value,

1 An additional embarrassment arose, in the case of the Liberator, from the action of the Hovey Committee, who had hitherto paid for one hundred copies of the paper, for gratuitous circulation. They now stopped the appropriation, ‘on the alleged ground . . . that the Liberator, for the countenance it has given to President Lincoln and his administration, “ has no more claim to be circulated by the Committee than any other Republican paper” ’ (Lib. 34: 210). The Draper Brothers of Hopedale, Mass., Edward Harris of Woonsocket, R. I., Samuel E. Sewall, and others voluntarily assumed the burden thus dropped by the Committee. From Henry Ward Beecher there came the following gay and characteristic note (Ms.):

Brooklyn, Feb. 4, 1865.
my dear Mr. Garrison: I have had the Liberator sent to me, free, for several years; on the principle, I presume, that I needed it. So long as I was in a state of nature, I consented to have a free gospel preached to me. But, as I have made up my mind, at length, that slavery is an evil, and ought to be abolished, I suppose that I can find no good reason for taking the Liberator without paying for it. I am truly yours, H. W. Beecher.

Please find a check for $25.00.


2 Ms. Nov. 26, 1864.

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