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Chapter 17: as in a looking glass.
Garrison was the most dogmatic, as he was the most earnest of men. It was almost next to impossible for him to understand that his way was not the only way to attain a given end. A position reached by him, he was curiously apt to look upon as a sort of
ultima thule of human endeavor in that direction of the moral universe.
And, notwithstanding instances of honest self-depreciation, there, nevertheless, hung around his personality an air and assumption of moral infallibility, as a reformer.
His was not a tolerant mind.
Differences with him he was prone to treat as gross departures from principle, as evidences of faithlessness to freedom.
He fell upon the men who did not see eye to eye with him with tomahawk and scalping knife.
He was strangely deficient in a sense of proportion in such matters.
His terrible severities of speech, he visited upon the slave-power and the
Liberty party alike.
And although a nonresistent, in that he eschewed the use of physical force, yet there never was born among the sons of men a more militant soul in the use of moral force, in the quickness with which he would whip out the rapiers, or hurl the bolts and bombs of his mother tongue at opponents.
The pioneer must have been an unconscious believer in the annihilation of the
