The circumstances of this outrage kindled Garrison's indignation to the highest pitch. Words were inadequate to express his emotions and agony of soul. In the temper of bold and clear-eyed leadership he wrote George W. Benson, his future brother-in-law, "we may as well, first as last, meet this proscriptive spirit, _and conquer it_. We--_i.e._, all the friends of the cause--must make this a common concern. The New Haven excitement has furnished a bad precedent--a second must not be given or I know not what we can do to raise up the colored population in a manner which their intellectual and moral necessities demand. In Boston we are all excited at the Canterbury affair. Colonizationists are rejoicing and Abolitionists looking sternly." Like a true general Garrison took in from his _Liberator_ outlook the entire field of the struggle. No friend of the slave, however distant, escaped his quick sympathy or ready reinforcements. To him the free people of color turned for championship, and to the _Liberator_ as a mouthpiece. The battle for their rights and for the freedom of their brethren in the South advanced apace. Everywhere the army of their friends and the army of their foes were in motion, and the rising storm winds of justice and iniquity were beginning "to bellow through the vast and boundless deep" of a nation's soul. CHAPTER IX. AGITATION AND REPRESSION. William Lloyd Garrison's return from his English mission was signalized by two closely related events, viz., the formation of the New York City Anti-Slavery Society, and the appearance of the first of a succession of anti-slavery mobs in the North. The news of his British successes had preceded him, and prepared for him a warm reception on the part of his pro-slavery countrymen. For had he not with malice prepense put down the "most glorious of Christian enterprises," and rebuked his own country in the house of strangers as recreant to freedom? And when O'Connell in Exeter Hall pointed the finger of scorn at America and made her a by-word and a hissing in the ears of Englishmen, was it not at a meeting got up to further the designs of this "misguided young gentlemen who has just returned from England whither he has recently been for the sole purpose as it would seem [to the _Commercial Advertiser_] of traducing the people and institutions of his own country." Had he not caught up and echoed back the hissing thunder of the great Irish orator:--"_Shame on the American Slaveholders_! Base wretches should we shout in chorus--base wretches, how dare you profane the temple of national freedom, the sacred fane of Republican rites, with the presence and the sufferings of human beings in chains and slavery!"