The vehemence with which the early antislavery apostles were conducting their agitation in the East naturally roused a corresponding violence of expression in every other part of the country. William Lloyd Garrison, the boldest and most aggressive non- resistant that ever lived, had, since 1831, been pouring forth once a week in the "Liberator" his earnest and eloquent denunciations of slavery, taking no account of the expedient or the possible, but demanding with all the fervor of an ancient prophet the immediate removal of the cause of offense. Oliver Johnson attacked the national sin and wrong, in the "Standard," with zeal and energy equally hot and untiring. Their words stung the slave-holding States to something like frenzy. The Georgia Legislature offered a reward of five thousand dollars to any one who should kidnap Garrison, or who should bring to conviction any one circulating the "Liberator" in the State. Yet so little known in their own neighborhoods were these early workers in this great reform that when the Mayor of Boston received remonstrances from certain Southern States against such an incendiary publication as the "Liberator," he was able to say that no member of the city government and no person of his acquaintance had ever heard of the paper or its editor; that on search being made it was found that "his office was an obscure hole, his only visible auxiliary a negro boy, and his supporters a very few insignificant persons of all colors." But the leaven worked continually, and by the time of which we are writing the antislavery societies of the North-east had attained a considerable vitality, and the echoes of their work came back from the South in furious resolutions of legislatures and other bodies, which, in their exasperation, could not refrain from this injudicious advertising of their enemies. Petitions to Congress, which were met by gag-laws, constantly increasing in severity, brought the dreaded discussion more and more before the public. But there was as yet little or no antislavery agitation in Illinois. [Sidenote: Jan 25, 1837.]