them or they will have the blood of the slave staining their garments.  This can be done charitably yet faithfully.  On the two old parties, especially the Whig-Taylor party, I would expend—­pro tempore, at least—­our heaviest ammunition.”  This is as it should be, the tone of wise and vigilant leadership, the application of the true test to the circumstances, viz., for freedom if against slavery; not to be satisfied, to be sure, with any thing less than the whole but disposed to give credit to whom it was due, whether much or little.  Pity that the pioneer could not have placed himself in this just and discriminating point of view in respect of his old enemy, Liberty party, praising in it what he found praiseworthy, while blaming it for what he felt was blameworthy.  But perfection weak human nature doth not attain to in this terrestrial garden of the passions, and so very likely the magnanimity which we have desired of Garrison is not for that garden to grow but another and a heavenly.

Garrison ill brooked opposition, came it from friends or foes.  He was so confident in his own positions that he could not but distrust their opposites.  Of course, if his were right, and of that doubt in his mind there was apparently none, then the positions of all others had to be wrong.  This masterful quality of the man was constantly betrayed in the acts of his life and felt by his closest friends and associates in the anti-slavery movement.  Quincy, writing to Richard Webb, narrates how, at the annual meeting of the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1843, Garrison was for removing it to Boston, but that he and Wendell Phillips were for keeping it where it then was in New York, giving at the same time sundry good and sufficient reasons for the faith that was in them, and how, thereupon, “Garrison dilated his nostrils like a war-horse, and snuffed indignation at us.”  “If the Boston friends were unwilling to take the trouble and responsibility,” were the petulant, accusative words put by Quincy into his chief’s mouth on the occasion, “then there was nothing more to be said; we must try to get along as well as we could in the old way.”  And how they disclaimed “any unwillingness to take trouble and responsibility,” while affirming “the necessity of their acting on their own idea.”

Another characteristic of the pioneer is touched upon by the same writer in a relation which he was making to Webb of Garrison’s election to the presidency of the parent society.  Says Quincy:  “Garrison makes an excellent president at a public meeting where the order of speakers is in some measure arranged, as he has great felicity in introducing and interlocuting remarks; but at a meeting for debate he does not answer so well, as he is rather too apt, with all the innocence and simplicity in the world, to do all the talking himself.”