building, until it reached No. 11, "under the eaves," whence it issued
weekly for many years to call the nation to repentance. A photographic
impression of this cradle-room of the anti-slavery movement has been
left by Oliver Johnson, an eye-witness. Says Mr. Johnson: "The dingy
walls; the small windows, bespattered with printer's ink; the press
standing in one corner; the composing-stands opposite; the long
editorial and mailing table, covered with newspapers; the bed of the
editor and publisher on the floor--all these make a picture never to be
forgotten." For the first eighteen months the partners toiled fourteen
hours a day, and subsisted "chiefly upon bread and milk, a few cakes,
and a little fruit, obtained from a baker's shop opposite, and a petty
cake and fruit shop in the basement," and, alas, "were on short commons
even at that." Amid such hard and grinding poverty was the _Liberator_
born. But the great end of the reformer glorified the mean surroundings:

"O truth! O Freedom! how are ye still born
In the rude stable, in the manger nursed;
What humble hands unbar those gates of morn
Through which the splendors of the New Day burst."


About the brow of this "infant crying in the night," shone aureole-like
the sunlit legend: _Our country is the world--our countrymen are
mankind._ The difference between this motto of the _Liberator_ and that
of the _Free Press_: _Our country, our whole country, and nothing but
our country_--measures the greatness of the revolution which had taken
place in the young editor. The grand lesson he had learned, than which
there is none greater, that beneath diversities of race, color, creed,
language, there is the one human principle, which makes all men kin. He
had learned at the age of twenty-five to know the mark of brotherhood