'When peace within the bosom reigns, And conscience gives th' approving voice, Though bound the human form in chains, Yet can the soul aloud rejoice. 'Tis true, my footsteps are confined-- I cannot range beyond this cell; But what can circumscribe my mind? To chain the winds attempt as well!' 'Confine me as a prisoner--but bind me not as a slave. Punish me as a criminal--but hold me not as a chattel. Torture me as a man--but drive me not like a beast. Doubt my sanity--but acknowledge my immortality.' In the course of the forenoon, after passing through the mockery of an examination, for form's sake, before Judge Whitman, I was released from prison; but, at the _earnest solicitation of the city authorities_, in order to tranquilize the public mind, I deemed it proper to leave the city for a few days, accompanied by my wife, whose situation was such as to awaken the strongest solicitude for her life." At this distance of time it is difficult to conceive of such scenes as occurring in Boston. They are to be accounted for by two things. First, the intense keenness of the instincts of the Slaveholding power in the United States, in discriminating from afar what the results of the Anti-Slavery discussion would be, and the real power which was arising in the apparently feeble body of the Abolitionists; and second, the thousand ties of politics, trade, blood relationship, friendship and religion that interlaced the South with the North, and made the North for many years a tool of southern dictators and a mere reflection of southern sympathies. There was scarcely a thing in northern society that was not interwoven and intertwisted with southern society. Northern schools and colleges were full of southern scholars--northern teachers were all the while seeking places on southern plantations. The great political bodies had each its southern wing, every religious denomination had its southern members and southern interests. Every kind of trade and industrial calling had its southern outlet. The ship builders of Maine went to Charleston for their cargoes. Plantations were fitted out at the North, by every kind of trade. Our mercantile world was truly and in fact one firm with the South and felt any disturbance to them as virtually as the South itself. Hence Garrison's instinctive feeling that the battle was to be fought _in the North_, where as yet there was a free press and the right of free speech.