While slavery was thus strengthening itself upon its own soil and in some respects also at the North, its champions ever more alert and forward, its old foes asleep, these very facts were provoking thought about the institution and hostility to it, destined in time to work its overthrow. Interested people saw that slavery, so aggressive and defiant, must be fought to be put down, and that if the Constitution was its bulwark, as all believed, provided a tithe of what the South as well as the North had said of its evils was true, the whole country, and not the South only, was guilty in tolerating the curse. In 1821 Lundy began publishing his Genius of Universal Emancipation, seconded, from 1829, by the more radical Garrison. In 1831 Garrison founded the Liberator, whose motto, "immediate and unconditional emancipation," was intended as a rebuke to the tame policy of the colonizationists. "I am in earnest," said the plucky man, when his utterances threatened to cost him his life, "I am in earnest, I will not equivocate, I will not excuse, I will not retreat a single inch, and I will be heard." These were startling tones. Had God turned a new prophet loose in the earth? The abolition spirit was a part of the general moral and religious quickening we have mentioned as beginning about 1825, and revealing itself in revivals, missions, a religious press, and belief in the end of the world as approaching. The ethical teaching of the great German philosopher, Emanuel Kant, denouncing all use of man as an instrument, began to take effect in America through the writings of Coleridge. Hatred of slavery was gradually intensified and spread. In 1832 rose the New England Anti-Slavery Society. In 1833 the American Society was organized, with a platform declaring "slavery a crime." [1833] [Illustration: Portrait.] John G. Whittier in 1833. This declaration marked one of the most important turning-points in all the history of the United States. It drew the line. It brought to view the presence in our land of two sets of earnest thinkers, with diametrically opposite views touching slavery, who could not permanently live together under one constitution. May, Phillips, Weld, Whittier, the Tappans, and many other men of intellect, of oratorical power, and of wealth, drew to Garrison's side. State abolition societies were organized all over the North, the Underground Railroad was hard worked in helping fugitives to Canada, and fiery prophets harangued wherever they could get a hearing, demanding "immediate abolition" in the name of God.