William Lloyd Garrison | Page 9

He had
not seen slavery, knew nothing of the evil. Acquaintance with the
deeper things of life, individual or national, comes only with increasing
years, they are hardly for him who has not yet reached his majority.
Slavery was the very deepest thing in the life of the nation sixty-four
years ago. And if Garrison did not then so understand it, neither did his
contemporaries, the wisest and greatest of them so understand it. The
subject of all others which attracted his attention, and kept his editorial
pen busy, was the claim of Massachusetts for indemnity from the
general government, for certain disbursements made by her for the
defence of her sea-coast during the war of 1812. This matter, which
forms but a mere dust point in the perspective of history, his ardent
young mind mistook for a principal object, erected into a permanent
question in the politics of the times. But the expenditure of enormous
energies upon things of secondary and of even tertiary importance, to
the neglect of others of prime and lasting interest, is supremely human.
He was errant where all men go astray. But the schoolmaster of the
nation was abroad, and was training this young man for the work he
was born to do. These six months were, therefore, not wasted, for in the
university of experience he did ever prove himself an apt scholar. One
lesson he had learned, which he never needed to relearn. Just what that
lesson was, he tells in his valedictory to the subscribers of the Free
Press, as follows: "This is a time-serving age; and he who attempts to

walk uprightly or speak honestly, cannot rationally calculate upon
speedy wealth or preferment." A sad lesson, to be sure, for one so
young to learn so thoroughly. Perhaps some reader will say that this
was cynical, the result of disappointment. But it was not cynical,
neither was it the result of disappointment. It was unvarnished truth,
and more's the pity, but truth it was none the less. It was one of those
hard facts, which he of all men, needed to know at the threshold of his
experience with the world. Such a revelation proves disastrous to the
many who go down to do business in that world. Ordinary and weak
and neutral moral constitutions are wrecked on this reef set in the
human sea. Like a true mariner he had written it boldly on his chart.
There at such and such a point in the voyage for the golden fleece, were
the rocks and the soul-devouring dragons of the way. Therefore, oh! my
soul, beware. What, indeed, would this argonaut of the press take in
exchange for his soul? Certainly not speedy wealth nor preferment. Ah!
he could not praise where he ought to reprobate; could not reprobate
where praise should be the meed. He had no money and little learning,
but he had a conscience and he knew that he must be true to that
conscience, come to him either weal or woe. Want renders most men
vulnerable, but to it, he appeared, at this early age, absolutely
invulnerable. Should he and that almost omnipotent inquisitor, public
opinion, ever in the future come into collision upon any principle of
action, a keen student of human nature might forsee that the young
recusant could never be starved into silence or conformity to popular
standards. And with this stern, sad lesson treasured up in his heart,
Garrison graduated from another room in the school-house of
experience. All the discoveries of the young journalist were not of this
grim character. He made another discovery altogether different, a real
gem of its kind. The drag-net of a newspaper catches all sorts of poets
and poetry, good, bad, and indifferent--oftener the bad and indifferent,
rarely the good. The drag-net of the Free Press was no exception to this
rule; but, one day, it fetched up from the depths of the hard
commonplaces of our New England town life a genuine pearl. We will
let Mr. Garrison tell the story in his own way:
"Going up-stairs to my office, one day, I observed a letter lying near
the door, to my address; which, on opening, I found to contain an

original piece of poetry for my paper, the Free Press. The ink was very
pale, the handwriting very small; and, having at that time a horror of
newspaper original poetry--which has rather increased than diminished
with the lapse of time--my first impulse was to tear it in pieces, without
reading it; the chances of rejection, after its perusal, being as
ninety-nine to one; ... but summoning resolution to read it, I was
equally surprised and gratified to find it above mediocrity, and so gave
it a place in my journal.... As I was anxious to find