Francis Jackson Garrison, William Lloyd Garrison, 1805-1879; the story of his life told by his children: volume 3

[86] ‘more anon’ and ‘more next week’ which ‘anon’ and ‘next week’ never arrive. This continuation from one number to another is, of course, sometimes unavoidable, but surely should be done as seldom as possible, and never proposed without being performed.

Then we complain that your editorials are too often wanting, or else such, from apparent haste, as those who love your fame cannot wish to see; that important topics, which you feel to be such, are too often either entirely passed over or very cursorily treated, and important moments like the present neglected. Perhaps the last Liberator and the present are the two most¹ important ones in the year, as thousands of persons read them, on account of the elections, who never open an A. S. paper at any other time. And yet the last was without editorial.

We have our suspicions, too, that good friends have been disaffected by the neglect of their communications; but of this we can only speak by conjecture. In short, it appears to those who are your warmest friends and the staunchest supporters of the paper, that you might make the Liberator a more powerful and useful instrumentality than it is, powerful and useful as it is, by additional exertions on your part. It is very unpleasant to hear invidious comparisons drawn between the Liberator and the Emancipator with regard to the manner of getting it up, and to have not to deny but to excuse them—and we knowing all the time that you have all the tact and technical talent for getting up a good paper that Leavitt has, with as much more² intellectual ability as you have more moral honesty, and only wanting some of his (pardon me) industry, application, and method.

Now we know that you have talent enough and to spare to write editorials, such as no other editor can; that you have the most ample materials for the best of selections, and eminent tact and sagacity for judging what is timely; and, moreover, that you have abundance of time for doing all this, if you would but have a little method in your madness. A week is long enough and to spare for getting up a paper if it be properly used, and all its work be not crowded into the last day. Fewer hours a day than most men of business have to give to their affairs, would do it all—provided the work were begun soon enough. It is not often that a crisis occurs that demands the editorial of an A. S. paper to be written at the last moment. Selections might be made with an eye to two or three papers ahead, and even editorials written, so as to give you opportunity to perform