I joyfully accept the fact, and leave all verbal criticism until a more suitable opportunity." But it must be confessed that at times during the struggle, Lincoln's timidity and apparent indifference as to the fate of slavery, in his anxiety to save the Union, weakened Garrison's confidence in him, and excited his keenest apprehensions "at the possibility of the war terminating without the utter extinction of slavery, by a new and more atrocious compromise on the part of the North than any that has yet been made." The pioneer therefore adjudged it prudent to get his battery into position and to visit upon the President for particular acts, such as the revocation of anti-slavery orders by sundry of his generals in the field, and upon particular members of his Cabinet who were understood to be responsible for the shuffling, hesitating action of the Government in its relation to slavery, an effective fire of criticism and rebuke. Nevertheless Mr. Garrison maintained toward the Government a uniform tone of sympathy and moderation. "I hold," said he, in reply to strictures of Mr. Phillips upon the President at the annual meeting of the Massachusetts Society in 1862; "I hold that it is not wise for us to be too microscopic in endeavoring to find disagreeable and annoying things, still less to assume that everything is waxing worse and worse, and that there is little or no hope." He himself was full of hope which no shortcomings of the Government was able to quench. He was besides beginning to understand the perplexities which beset the administration, to appreciate the problem which confronted the great statesman who was at the head of the nation. He was getting a clear insight into the workings of Lincoln's mind, and into the causes which gave to his political pilotage an air of timidity and indecision.