It seems quite unnecessary, therefore, to record that
he proceeded immediately to demonstrate that it was
no high sounding and insincere declaration. For
in the second number, he mentions with that singular
serenity, which ever distinguished him on such occasions,
the discontinuance of the paper on account of matter
contained in the first issue, by ten indignant subscribers.
“Nevertheless,” he adds, “our happiness
at the loss of such subscribers is not a whit abated.
We beg no man’s patronage, and shall
ever erase with the same cheerfulness that we insert
the name of any individual.... Personal or political
offence we shall studiously avoid—truth
never.” Here was plainly a wholly
new species of the genus homo in the editorial
seat. What, expect to make a newspaper pay and
not beg for patronage? Why the very idea was enough
to make newspaperdom go to pieces with laughter.
Begging for patronage, howling for subscribers, cringing,
crawling, changing color like the chameleon, howling
for Barabbas or bellowing against Jesus, all these
things must your newspaper do to prosper. On them
verily hang the whole law and all the profits of modern
journalism. This is what the devil of competition
was doing in that world when William Lloyd Garrison
entered it. It took him up into an exceedingly
high mountain, we may be certain, and offered him
wealth, position, and power, if he would do what all
others were doing. And he would not. He went
on editing and publishing his paper for six months
regardful only of what his reason approved—regardless
always of the disapproval of others. Not once
did he palter with his convictions or juggle with
his self-respect for the sake of pelf or applause.
His human horizon was contracted, to be sure.
It could hardly be otherwise in one so young.
His world was his country, and patriotism imposed
limits upon his affections. “Our country,
our whole country, and nothing but our country,”
was the ardent motto of the Free Press.
The love of family comes, in the order of growth, before
the love of country; and the love of country precedes
the love of all mankind. “First the blade,
then the ear, then the full corn in the ear,”
is the great law of love in the soul as of corn in
the soil. Besides this contraction of the affections,
there was also manifest in his first journalistic
venture a deficiency in the organ of vision, a failure
to see into things and their relations. What
he saw he reported faithfully, suppressing nothing,
adding nothing. But the objects which passed across
the disk of his editoral intelligence were confined
almost entirely to the surface of things, to the superficies
of national life. He had not the ken at twenty
to penetrate beneath the happenings of current politics.
Of the existence of slavery as a supreme reality, we
do not think that he then had the faintest suspicion.
No shadow of its tremendous influence as a political
power seemed to have arrested for a brief instant