age; whose sluggish legs were somewhat concealed by an over-shadowing abdomen; with head downcast and arms shriveled, and dangling almost helpless by his side, and incapable of being magnetized for the use of the orator.”  The voice and the front of “the God-like” had preceded the “poor decrepit old man” to the grave.  Garrison dealt no less roughly and irreverently with another of the authors of the wicked law and another of the superannuated divinities of a shopkeeping North, Henry Clay.  “HENRY CLAY, with one foot in the grave,” exclaimed the reformer, “and just ready to have both body and soul cast into hell, as if eager to make his damnation doubly sure, rises in the United States Senate and proposes an inquiry into the expediency of passing yet another law, by which every one who shall dare peep or mutter against the execution of the Fugitive Slave Bill shall have his life crushed out.”

In those trial times words from the mouth or the pen of Abolitionists had the force of deadly missiles.  Incapacitated as Garrison was to resort to physical resistance to the Fugitive Slave Law by his non-resistant doctrine, it seemed that all the energy and belligerency of the man went into the most tremendous verbal expressions.  They were like adamantine projectiles flung with the savage strength of a catapult against the walls of slavery.  The big sinners, like Webster and Clay, he singled out for condign punishment, were objects of his utmost severities of speech.  It was thus that he essayed to breach the iron dungeon in which the national iniquity had shut the national conscience.  Saturated was the reformer’s mind with the thought of the Bible, its solemn and awful imagery, its fiery and prophetic abhorrence and denunciations of national sins, all of which furnished him an unfailing magazine whence were drawn the bolts which he launched against the giant sin and the giant sinners of his time.  And so Clay had not only “one foot in the grave,” but was “just ready to have both body and soul cast into hell.”

While physical resistance of the Slave Law was wholly out of the question with Garrison, he, nevertheless, refused to condemn the men with whom it was otherwise.  Here he was anything but a fanatic.  All that he required was that each should be consistent with his principles.  If those principles bade him resist the enforcement of the Black Bill, the apostle of non-resistance was sorry enough, but in this emergency, though he possessed the gentleness of the dove, he also practised the wisdom of the serpent.  That truth moves with men upon lower as well as higher planes he well knew.  It is always partial and many-colored, refracted as it is through the prisms of human passion and prejudice.  If it appear unto some minds in the red bar of strife and blood, so be it.  Each must follow the light which it is given him to discern, whether the blue of love or the red of war.  Great coadjutors, like Wendell Phillips, Theodore Parker, and Dr. Henry I. Bowditch, were for forcible resistance to the execution of the law.  So were the colored people.  Preparations to this end went on vigorously in Boston under the direction of the Vigilance Committee.  The Crafts escaped the clutches of the slave-hunters, so did Shadrach escape them, but Sims and Burns fell into them and were returned to bondage.