Abolition is a fool idea, but we must have free speech--that is what our Constitution is built upon! Law is supposed to protect free speech, even to voicing wrong ideas! Surely a man has a legal right to a wrong opinion! A mob in Boston to put down free speech! This young lawyer was not an Abolitionist--not he, but he was an American, descended from the Puritans, with ancestors who fought in the War of the Revolution--he believed in fair play. His cheeks burned with shame. * * * * * Seen from Mount Olympus, how small and pitiful must seem the antics of Earth--all these churches and little sects--our laws, our arguments, our courts of justice, our elections, our wars! Viewed across the years, the Abolition Movement seems a small thing. It is so thoroughly dead--so far removed from our present interests! We hear a Virginian praise John Brown, listen to Henry Watterson as he says, "The South never had a better friend than Lincoln," or brave General Gordon, as he declares, "We now know that slavery was a gigantic mistake, and that Emerson was right when he said, 'One end of the slave's chain is always riveted to the wrist of the master.'" We can scarcely comprehend that fifty years ago the trinity of money, fashion and religion combined in the hot endeavor to make human slavery a perpetuity; that the man of the North who hinted at resisting the return of a runaway slave was in danger of financial ruin, social ostracism, and open rebuke from the pulpit. The ears of Boston were so stuffed with South Carolina cotton that they could not hear the cry of the oppressed. Commerce was fettered by self-interest, and law ever finds precedents and sanctions for what commerce most desires. And as for the pulpit, it is like the law, in that Scriptural warrant is always forthcoming for what the pew wishes to do. Slavery, theoretically, might be an error, but in America it was a commercial, political, social and religious necessity, and any man who said otherwise was an enemy of the State. William Lloyd Garrison said otherwise. But who was William Lloyd Garrison? Only an ignorant and fanatical freethinker from the country town of Newburyport, Massachusetts. He had started four or five newspapers, and all had failed, because he would not keep his pen quiet on the subject of slavery. New England must have cotton, and cotton could not be produced without slaves. Garrison was a fool. All good Christians refused to read his vile sheet, and businessmen declined to advertise with him or to subscribe to his paper. However, he continued to print things, telling what he thought of slavery. In Eighteen Hundred Thirty-one, he was issuing a periodical called, "The Liberator."