This doctrine of immediate as opposed to gradual emancipation, was not original with Garrison, nor was he the first to enunciate it.  More than a dozen years before he was converted to it, Rev. George Bourne, in “The Book and Slavery Irreconcilable,” had shown that “the system (of slavery) is so entirely corrupt that it admits of no cure but by a total and immediate abolition.  For a gradual emancipation is a virtual recognition of the right, and establishes the rectitude of the practice.  If it be just for one moment, it is hallowed forever; and if it be inequitable, not a day should it be tolerated.”  In 1824, eight years after the publication of Bourne’s book, and five years before Garrison announced the doctrine in the Genius, the Rev. James Duncan maintained it, in his “Treatise on Slavery,” with no uncertainty of sense or conviction.  But neither Bourne nor Duncan had been able to effect an incarnation of the doctrine, without which the good which it aimed at could not be achieved.  What they failed to effect, it is the glory of Garrison that he achieved in his own person.  He was “total and immediate Abolition” personified.  “Truth is mighty and will prevail,” is a wise saying and worthy of acceptation.  But this ultimate prevailing of TRUTH depends mainly upon individual effort, applied not intermittently, but steadily to a particular segment of the circle of conduct.  It is the long, strong, never-ending pull and tug upon the wheels of conduct, which marks the great reformer.  He finds his age or country stuck in some Serbonian bog of iniquity.  He prays, but he prays with his shoulders braced strenuously against the body of society, and he does not cease his endeavors until a revolution in conduct places his age or country on firm ground beyond its Serbonian bog.  The coming of such a man is no accident.  When the Hour is ready and the Man comes, a new epoch in the life of a people arises from the conjunction.  Of such vast consequence verily was the coming into American history of William Lloyd Garrison.

CHAPTER V.

THE DAY OF SMALL THINGS.

After leaving Baltimore, Garrison clung pathetically to the belief that, if he told what he had seen of the barbarism of slavery to the North, he would be certain to enlist the sympathy and aid of its leaders, political and ecclesiastical, in the cause of emancipation.  The sequel to his efforts in this regard proved that he was never more mistaken in his life.  He addressed letters to men like Webster, Jeremiah Mason, Lyman Beecher, and Dr. Channing, “holding up to their view the tremendous iniquity of the land, and begging them, ere it should be too late, to interpose their great power in the Church and State, to save our country from the terrible calamities which the sin of slavery was bringing upon us.”  But there is no evidence that this appeal produced the feeblest ripple in the lives of the two first; and upon the two last