To the truly great man it is the triumph of his cause, and not personal success, that will make him glad and thankful. Garrison’s contemporaries fully realized how he had been the chief cause in bringing about the emancipation of the slaves. Those who have lived since may have forgotten, and the great figure of Lincoln stands out as the man who before all others brought an infamous system to an end.
Garrison’s work was done, and he retired into private life. He had not been spoilt by publicity; he never really cared for a life of excitement; he was extraordinarily modest and had no personal ambition at all. Though most of his life he had been abused and slandered, it had never made him bitter; he remained happy, serene, and good-tempered in himself, and kept his warm affections to the end of his life. His domestic life, too, was very happy, and he was devoted to his wife and children. He died when he was seventy-three, at Boston, quite peacefully, his wife having died three years before him.
Garrison had his faults, if faults they could be called. He was too easily taken in—he had perhaps too open a mind, and at one time got into the hands of some rather shady people, who led him to take up spiritualism, quack medicines, phrenology, homeopathy, and so on. He was always hoping that any one of these things might possibly help to improve the conditions of mankind. But some of his fads, as they were then called, have become the beliefs of a great many people in the world. The supporters of The Liberator were annoyed with Garrison for preaching in his paper against capital punishment, against governments and the Church, and in favor of votes for women and temperance. They did not see why they should have to believe in these things because they believed in the freeing of the negro. But Garrison’s beliefs were the result of his experience and circumstances. He hated governments because his Government had built up its Constitution on slavery; he despised the Church because it upheld the crime of slavery; if it did not give it active support, it gave it by silence as to its evils, by tolerating slave-holding by its ministers and members, and by preventing whenever it could meetings or discussions being held against it. The Church, Garrison thought, should not be regarded as the Church of Christ, but as the foe of freedom, humanity, and religion. He hated Sunday because on that day no abolition meetings could be held—yet, as we know, he had been a strict church-goer as a young man, and was always to the end of his life a Christian, longing for men and women and the Church to turn to true Christianity, apart from its forms and dogmas.
Garrison had demanded for the negro full citizenship, but he did not live to see how strong is the prejudice in many places against black people. He had not to face this problem of race. It was a great step in the history of civilization to abolish slavery, but it was not the end of the negro question. Is the black man to have the same rights as the white man, the same opportunities for education and improvement? Is there a place for him in this world? Can he make himself useful and indispensable? If we read the history of the negroes’ struggles to get education against fearful difficulties and opposition, of how they endeavored to learn with their clouded, unused minds, and of how they succeeded in lifting themselves by their own efforts out of ignorance and degradation, I think we must believe that there is a place for them, that, given a share in the world’s work and its responsibilities, they will show themselves worthy of the trust put in them. But the white man himself must become more enlightened before an answer to this problem can be found. In the words of a remarkable negro, Booker Washington, who rose from being a slave to the position of a great teacher: “You cannot hold a man down in a ditch without stopping down there with him yourself.”
D. P.
XI
HENRY THOREAU
1817–1862
I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.
Henry David Thoreau was born in Concord, Massachusetts, July 12, 1817, and lived most of his life in or near his native town. The world, if you were to ask it who Thoreau was, would probably say “a crank,” because he did not think and act in quite the same way as other people, and because he practised what he preached. He never went to church or voted at elections, or drank wine or smoked tobacco, and he went to live alone in the woods. He was an author and a naturalist; and, happily for us, he has been able to reveal through his writings what sort of man he was.