It cannot be denied that the spirit of Mr. Garrison’s mind has made the minds of multitudes--yes, of the majority of the people of our country--take a new direction in favor of impartial liberty. Of course, I do not claim that this new love of liberty originated with him. He was no more the creator of this moral power, which has taken our nation in its grasp, and is remoulding all our civil and religious institutions, than the fountain in the garden at Baden is the originator of the mighty Danube. Mr. Garrison, no less than that spring, is but a medium, through which the Father of all mercies pours from the hollow of his hand the waters that refresh the earth, and, from the fulness of his heart, the streams that purify the souls, making glad the children of God on earth and in heaven. But although to God we must ultimately ascribe all our blessings, yet do we naturally, and with great reason, revere and love as our _benefactors_ those persons who have been the means and instruments by which personal, political, or religious blessings have been conferred upon us. Especially do we acknowledge our indebtedness to them, if they have suffered reproach, persecution, loss, death, for the sake of the good which we enjoy. The time, therefore, is coming, if it be not now, when the people of our reunited Republic will gratefully own William Lloyd Garrison among the greatest benefactors of our nation and our race. However much our gratitude to the fathers of our Revolution may dispose us to hide their shortcomings of the goal of impartial liberty, however much we may find or devise to excuse or extenuate their infidelity to the cause of down-trodden humanity, there the shameful facts stand, and never can be effaced from the record;--the _fact_ that (notwithstanding their glorious Declaration) the American revolutionists did not intend the deliverance of _all_ men from oppression; no, not of all the men who heroically fought for it side by side with themselves; no, not of the men who, of all others, needed that deliverance the most;--the _fact_ that the Constitution of this Republic (notwithstanding its avowed purpose) did not mean to secure liberty to _all_ the dwellers in the land over which it was to preside; nor did it provide that those might depart from under it who were not to have any share in its blessings, nor allow the spirit of liberty in them to assert its claims;--the shameful _fact_ that the aim, the tendency, and the result of that great struggle for freedom were partial, restricted, selfish;--the terrible fact that the American revolutionists of 1776 left more firmly established in our country a system of bondage, a slavery, “one hour of which” was known and acknowledged by them to be “more intolerable than whole ages of that from which they had revolted.”