skin running at large among the good shepherd’s flock, and inflicting infinite hurt upon his poor sheep.  He no longer wondered at the horror which the colonization scheme inspired among the free people of color.  They were right.  The society was their dangerous and determined enemy; it was the bulwark of the slave-holding classes.  With the instinct of a great purpose he resolved to carry this powerful bulwark of slavery by assault.  To the attack he returned week after week in the Liberator, during a year and a half.  Then he hurled himself upon it with all his guns, facts, arguments, denunciations, blowing away and burning up every shred of false covering from the doctrines, principles, and purposes of the society, revealing it to mankind in its base and monstrous character.

The society’s one motive “to get rid of the free people of color,” was outrageous enough, but this was not its only sin.  There was another phase to the mischief it was working, which lifted it to the rank of a great sinner.  It was not only harmful in its principles and purposes.  “It imperatively and effectually seals up the lips,” so Garrison accused it, “of a vast number of influential and pious men, who, for fear of giving offence to those slaveholders with whom they associate, and thereby leading to a dissolution of the compact, dare not expose the flagrant enormities of the system of slavery, nor denounce the crime of holding human beings in bondage.  They dare not lead to the onset against the forces of tyranny; and if they shrink from the conflict, how shall the victory be won?  I do not mean to aver that in their sermons, or addresses, or private conversations, they never allude to the subject of slavery; for they do so frequently, or at least every Fourth of July.  But my complaint is that they content themselves with representing slavery as an evil—­a misfortune—­a calamity which has been entailed upon us by former generations,—­and not as an individual CRIME, embracing in its folds, robbery, cruelty, oppression, and piracy. They do not identify the criminal; they make no direct, pungent, earnest appeal to the consciences of men-stealers.”  This was a damning bill, but it was true in every particular; and the evidence which Garrison adduced to establish his charges was overwhelming and irrefragable.

Nearly fifty years afterward, Elizur Wright described the baleful influence of the society upon the humanity and philanthropy of the nation.  “The humanity and philanthropy,” he said, “which could not otherwise be disposed of, was ingeniously seduced into an African Colonization Society, whereby all slaves who had grown seditious and troublesome to their masters could be transplanted on the pestiferous African coast.  That this wretched and seemingly transparent humbug could have deluded anybody, must now seem past belief; but I must with shame confess the fact that I for one was deluded by it.  And that fact would put me in doubt of my own sanity at