The Texan struggle terminated in the usual way, in the triumph of the slave-power.  Texas was annexed and admitted into the sisterhood of States, giving to the Southern section increased slave representation in both branches of Congress, and thereby aiding to fasten, what at the moment appeared to be its permanent domination in national affairs.  As Garrison had apprehended, the performance of the North fell far short of its protestations when the crisis came.  It swallowed all its brave words, and collapsed into feeble and disheartened submission to its jubilant and hitherto invincible antagonist.  The whole North except the small and irrepressible band of Garrisonian Abolitionists were cast down by the revulsive wave of this disastrous event.  Writing to his friend Webb, Garrison discourses thus upon the great defeat:  “Apparently the slave-holding power has never been so strong, has never seemed to be so invincible, has never held such complete mastery over the whole, has never so successfully hurled defiance at the Eternal and Just One, as at the present time; and yet never has it in reality been so weak, never has it had so many uncompromising assailants, never has it been so filled with doubt and consternation, never has it been so near its downfall, as at this moment.  Upon the face of it, this statement looks absurdly paradoxical; but it is true, nevertheless.  We are groping in thick darkness; but it is that darkest hour which is said to precede the dawn of day.”

CHAPTER XVII.

AS IN A LOOKING GLASS.

Garrison was the most dogmatic, as he was the most earnest of men.  It was almost next to impossible for him to understand that his way was not the only way to attain a given end.  A position reached by him, he was curiously apt to look upon as a sort of ultima thule of human endeavor in that direction of the moral universe.  And, notwithstanding instances of honest self-depreciation, there, nevertheless, hung around his personality an air and assumption of moral infallibility, as a reformer.  His was not a tolerant mind.  Differences with him he was prone to treat as gross departures from principle, as evidences of faithlessness to freedom.  He fell upon the men who did not see eye to eye with him with tomahawk and scalping knife.  He was strangely deficient in a sense of proportion in such matters.  His terrible severities of speech, he visited upon the slave-power and the Liberty party alike.  And although a non-resistent, in that he eschewed the use of physical force, yet there never was born among the sons of men a more militant soul in the use of moral force, in the quickness with which he would whip out the rapiers, or hurl the bolts and bombs of his mother tongue at opponents.  The pioneer must have been an unconscious believer in the annihilation of the wicked, as he must have been an unconscious believer in the wickedness of all opposition to his idea of right and duty.  This, of course, must be taken only as a broad description of the reformer’s character.  He was a man, one of the grandest America has given to the world, but still a man with his tendon of Achilles, like the rest of his kind.