William Lloyd Garrison | Page 8

way, but it was poor journalism some will say. And without doubt when judged by the common commercial standard it was poor journalism. In this view it is a remarkable production, but in another aspect it is still more remarkable in that it took with absolute accuracy the measure of the man. As a mental likeness it is simply perfect. At no time during his later life did the picture cease to be an exact moral representation of his character. It seems quite unnecessary, therefore, to record that he proceeded immediately to demonstrate that it was no high sounding and insincere declaration. For in the second number, he mentions with that singular serenity, which ever distinguished him on such occasions, the discontinuance of the paper on account of matter contained in the first issue, by ten indignant subscribers. "Nevertheless," he adds, "our happiness at the loss of such subscribers is not a whit abated. We beg no man's patronage, and shall ever erase with the same cheerfulness that we insert the name of any individual.... Personal or political offence we shall studiously avoid--truth never." Here was plainly a wholly new species of the genus homo in the editorial seat. What, expect to make a newspaper pay and not beg for patronage? Why the very idea was enough to make newspaperdom go to pieces with laughter. Begging for patronage, howling for subscribers, cringing, crawling, changing color like the chameleon, howling for Barabbas or bellowing against Jesus, all these things must your newspaper do to prosper. On them verily hang the whole law and all the profits of modern journalism. This is what the devil of competition was doing in that world when William Lloyd Garrison entered it. It took him up into an exceedingly high mountain, we may be certain, and offered him wealth, position, and power, if he would do what all others were doing. And he would not. He went on editing and publishing his paper for six months regardful only of what his reason approved--regardless always of the disapproval of others. Not once did he palter with his convictions or juggle with his self-respect for the sake of pelf or applause. His human horizon was contracted, to be sure. It could hardly be otherwise in one so young. His world was his country, and patriotism imposed limits upon his affections. "Our country, our whole country, and nothing but our country," was the ardent motto of the Free Press. The love of family comes, in the order of growth, before the love of country; and the love of country precedes the love of all mankind. "First the blade, then the ear, then the full corn in the ear," is the great law of love in the soul as of corn in the soil. Besides this contraction of the affections, there was also manifest in his first journalistic venture a deficiency in the organ of vision, a failure to see into things and their relations. What he saw he reported faithfully, suppressing nothing, adding nothing. But the objects which passed across the disk of his editoral intelligence were confined almost entirely to the surface of things, to the superficies of national life. He had not the ken at twenty to penetrate beneath the happenings of current politics. Of the existence of slavery as a supreme reality, we do not think that he then had the faintest suspicion. No shadow of its tremendous influence as a political power seemed to have arrested for a brief instant his attention. He could copy into his paper this atrocious sentiment which Edward Everett delivered in Congress, without the slightest comment or allusion. "Sir, I am no soldier. My habits and education are very unmilitary, but there is no cause in which I would sooner buckle a knapsack on my back, and put a musket on my shoulder than that of putting down a servile insurrection at the South." The reason is plain enough. Slavery was a terra incognito to him then, a book of which he had not learned the ABC. Mr. Everett's language made no impression on him, because he had not the key to interpret its significance. What he saw, that he set down for his readers, without fear or favor. 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