painted the woes of the slaves as if he, too, had been a slave. For the
first time the masters found a man who rebuked them as not before had
they been rebuked. Others may have equivocated, but this man called
things by their proper names, a spade, a spade, and sin, sin. Others may
have contented themselves with denunciations of the sins and with
excuses for the sinner, as a creature of circumstances, the victim of
ancestral transgressions, but this man offered no excuses for the
slave-holding sinner. Him and his sin he denounced in language, which
the Eternal puts only into the mouths of His prophets. It was, as he had
said, "On this subject I do not wish to think, or speak, or write, with
moderation." The strength and resources of his mother-tongue seemed to
him wholly inadequate for his needs, to express the transcendent
wickedness of slave-holding. All the harsh, the stern, the terrible and
tremendous energies of the English speech he drew upon, and launched at
slaveholders. Amid all of this excess of the enthusiast there was the
method of a calculating mind. He aimed to kindle a conflagration because
he had icebergs to melt. "The public shall not be imposed upon," he
replied to one of his critics, "and men and things shall be called by
their right names. I retract nothing, I blot out nothing. My language is
exactly such as suits me; it will displease many, I know; to displease
them is my intention." He was philosopher enough to see that he could
reach the national conscience only by exciting the national anger. It
was not popular rage, which he feared but popular apathy. If he could
goad the people to anger on the subject of slavery he would soon be rid
of their apathy. And so week after week he piled every sort of
combustible material, which he was able to collect on board the
_Liberator_ and lighting it all, sent the fiery messenger blazing among
the icebergs of the Union. Slaveholders were robbers, murderers,
oppressors; they were guilty of all the sins of the decalogue, were in a
word the chief of sinners. At the same moment that the reformer denied