“Garrison did not _create_ the anti-slavery spirit of the North. He was the offspring of it. It existed before he was born. But he at one time more powerfully developed and organized it than any other one mind; and developed it in modes and spirit, as we think, most unfortunate. Anti-slavery under his influence was all teeth and claw. It fought. It never conciliated. It gained not one step by kindness. It won not a single fort by surrender. It bombarded everything it met, and stormed every place which it won. We do not deny that Garrison and his early followers did a great work. Another generation will divide praise and blame, as no one is fitted to do in the heats of the present day. But when bare justice shall be done we believe that it will be found that a noble soul, deeply and truly benevolent, who sought the truest interests of his age, yet sought them with such a fierceness and such a hard and relentless courage as constantly roused up in his path the worst feelings of man, and heaped obstacles before him to such a degree that at length, in combating them, his sympathies for good seemed swallowed up in a bitter hatred of evil. The result of the agitation, inspired largely with this feeling, was that almost every interest in the nation rose up against the movement with which he was identified. Churches dreaded abolitionism, parties hated abolitionism, commerce abhorred abolitionism. Mobs rioted around the meetings, and threatened the dwellings, the stores, and the very persons of Abolitionists. “There was odium and influence enough arrayed against the anti-slavery movement, under the form of early abolitionism, to have sunk ten enterprises which depended on men for existence. But there was a spirit in this cause, there was a secret strength, which nerved it, and it lived right on, and grew, and trampled down opposition, and came forth victorious! There was an irresistibility in it which made it superior to the faults of its friends and the deadly hatred of its enemies.” It will be seen from the above how thoroughly he differed from what may be called the right wing of the Abolition party. This difference is emphasized and the spirit which impelled him is indicated in an address which he delivered before the annual meeting of the Anti-Slavery Society, and in a letter which he wrote to the New York _Tribune_ in answer to a criticism that appeared in that paper: