staggering and bleeding, was no longer what it had been, a vague and
shadowy apparition, but rather a terrible and tremendous reality against
which he must go forth to fight the fight of a lifetime. And so he
girded him with his life purpose and flung his moral earnestness against
the triple-headed curse of intemperance, slavery, and war. A mighty
human love had begun to flow inward and over him. And as the tide
steadily rose it swallowed and drowned all the egoism of self and race
in the altruism of an all-embracing humanity. When an apprentice in the
office of the Newburyport _Herald_, and writing on the subject of South
American affairs he grew hot over the wrongs suffered by American
vessels at Valparaiso and Lima. He was for finishing "with cannon what
cannot be done in a conciliatory and equitable manner, where justice
demands such proceedings." This was at seventeen when he was a boy with
the thoughts of a boy. Six years later he is a man who has looked upon
the sorrows of men. His old boy-world is far behind him, and the
ever-present sufferings of his kind are in front of him. War now is no
longer glorious, for it adds immeasurably to the sum of human misery.
War ought to be abolished with intemperance and slavery. And this duty
he began to utter in the ears of his country. "The brightest traits in
the American character will derive their luster, not from the laurels
picked from the field of blood, not from the magnitude of our navy and
the success of our arms," he proclaimed, "but from our exertions to
banish war from the earth, to stay the ravages of intemperance among all
that is beautiful and fair, to unfetter those who have been enthralled
by chains, which we have forged, and to spread the light of knowledge
and religious liberty, wherever darkness and superstition reign.... The
struggle is full of sublimity, the conquest embraces the world." Lundy
himself did not fully appreciate the immense gain, which his cause had
made in the conversion of Garrison into an active friend of the slave.
Not at once certainly. Later he knew. The discovery of a kindred spirit