their right of property in the slave, he attacked their character also,
held them up in their relation of masters to the reprobation of the
nation and of mankind as monsters of injustice and inhumanity. The tone
which he held toward them, steadily, without shadow of change, was the
tone of a righteous man toward the workers of iniquity. The
indifference, the apathy, the pro-slavery sympathy and prejudice of the
free States rendered the people of the North hardly less culpable. They
were working iniquity with the people of the South. This was the long,
sharp goad, which the young editor thrust in between the bars of the
Union and stirred the guilty sections to quick and savage outbursts of
temper against him and the bitter truths which he preached. Almost
directly the proofs came to him that he was HEARD at the South and at
the North alike. Angry growls reached his ears in the first month of the
publication of the _Liberator_ from some heartless New England editors
in denunciation of his "violent and intemperate attacks on
slaveholders." The _Journal_, published at Louisville, Kentucky, and
edited by George D. Prentice, declared that, "some of his opinions with
regard to slavery in the United States are no better than lunacy." The
_American Spectator_ published at the seat of the National Government,
had hoped that the good sense of the "late talented and persecuted
junior editor" of the _Genius_, "would erelong withdraw him even from
the side of the Abolitionists." And from farther South the growl which
the reformer heard was unmistakably ferocious. It was from the State of
South Carolina and the Camden _Journal_, which pronounced the
_Liberator_ "a scandalous and incendiary budget of sedition." These were
the beginning of the chorus of curses, which soon were to sing their
serpent songs about his head. Profane and abusive letters from irate
slaveholders and their Northern sympathisers began to pour into the
sanctum of the editor. Within a few months after the first issue of the
_Liberator_ the whole aspect of the world without had changed toward