“O small beginnings ye are great and strong,
  Based on a faithful heart and weariless brain! 
  Ye build the future fair, ye conquer wrong. 
  Ye earn the crown, and wear it not in vain!”

CHAPTER VI.

THE HEAVY WORLD IS MOVED.

Archimedes with his lever desired a place to stand that he might move the world of matter.  Garrison with his paper, having found a place for his feet, demonstrated speedily his ability to push from its solid base the world of mind.  His plan was very simple, viz., to reveal slavery as it then existed in its naked enormity, to the conscience of the North, to be “as harsh as truth and as uncompromising as justice.”  And so, week after week, he packed in the columns of the Liberator facts, the most damning facts, against slaveholders, their cruelty and tyranny.  He painted the woes of the slaves as if he, too, had been a slave.  For the first time the masters found a man who rebuked them as not before had they been rebuked.  Others may have equivocated, but this man called things by their proper names, a spade, a spade, and sin, sin.  Others may have contented themselves with denunciations of the sins and with excuses for the sinner, as a creature of circumstances, the victim of ancestral transgressions, but this man offered no excuses for the slave-holding sinner.  Him and his sin he denounced in language, which the Eternal puts only into the mouths of His prophets.  It was, as he had said, “On this subject I do not wish to think, or speak, or write, with moderation.”  The strength and resources of his mother-tongue seemed to him wholly inadequate for his needs, to express the transcendent wickedness of slave-holding.  All the harsh, the stern, the terrible and tremendous energies of the English speech he drew upon, and launched at slaveholders.  Amid all of this excess of the enthusiast there was the method of a calculating mind.  He aimed to kindle a conflagration because he had icebergs to melt.  “The public shall not be imposed upon,” he replied to one of his critics, “and men and things shall be called by their right names.  I retract nothing, I blot out nothing.  My language is exactly such as suits me; it will displease many, I know; to displease them is my intention.”  He was philosopher enough to see that he could reach the national conscience only by exciting the national anger.  It was not popular rage, which he feared but popular apathy.  If he could goad the people to anger on the subject of slavery he would soon be rid of their apathy.  And so week after week he piled every sort of combustible material, which he was able to collect on board the Liberator and lighting it all, sent the fiery messenger blazing among the icebergs of the Union.  Slaveholders were robbers, murderers, oppressors; they were guilty of all the sins of the decalogue, were in a word the chief of sinners.  At the same moment that the