clearly evinced the strength of this excitement than the general interest taken in this subject by the conductors of the press.  From Maine to the Mississippi, and as far as printing has penetrated—­even among the Cherokee Indians—­but one sentiment seems to pervade the public papers, viz., the necessity of strenuous exertion for the suppression of intemperance.”  Such a demonstration of the tremendous power of a single righteous soul for good, we may be sure, exerted upon Garrison lasting influences.  What a revelation it was also of the transcendent part which the press was capable of playing in the revolution of popular sentiment upon moral questions; and of the supreme service of organization as a factor in reformatory movements.  The seeds sowed were faith in the convictions of one man against the opinions, the prejudices, and the practices of the multitude; and knowledge of and skill in the use of the instruments by which the individual conscience may be made to correct and renovate the moral sense of a nation.  But there was another seed corn dropped at this time in his mind, and that is the immense utility of woman in the work of regenerating society.  She it is who feels even more than man the effects of social vices and sins, and to her the moral reformer should strenuously appeal for aid.  And this, with the instinct of genius, Garrison did in the temperance reform, nearly seventy years ago.  His editorials in the Philanthropist in the year 1828 on “Female Influence” may be said to be the courier avant of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union of to-day, as they were certainly the precursors of the female anti-slavery societies of a few years later.

But now, without his knowing it, a stranger from a distant city entered Boston with a message, which was to change the whole purpose of the young editor’s life.  It was Benjamin Lundy, the indefatigable friend of the Southern slave, the man who carried within his breast the whole menagerie of Southern slavery.  He was fresh from the city which held the dust of Fanny Garrison, who had once written to her boy in Newburyport, how the good God had cared for her in the person of a colored woman.  Yes, she had written:  “The ladies are all kind to me, and I have a colored woman that waits on me, that is so kind no one can tell how kind she is; and although a slave to man, yet a free-born soul, by the grace of God.  Her name is Henny, and should I never see you again, and you should come where she is, remember her, for your poor mother’s sake.”  And now, without his dreaming of it, this devoted Samaritan in black, who, perhaps, had long ago joined her dear friend in the grave, was coming to that very boy, now grown to manhood, to claim for her race what the mother had asked for her, the kind slave-woman.  Not one of all those little ones of the nation but who had a home in the many-mansioned heart of Lundy.  He had been an eye and ear witness of the barbarism of slavery.  “My heart,” he sobbed,