His politely bowing to the furious Boston mob before descending to put himself in their hands, is a very characteristic thing, and during all the tossings and tumults of the hour that followed, Garrison was probably the serenest person that ever had his clothes torn off his back for expressing his opinions.

That language in the Liberator which looked to the world as if it must have been uttered in a passion, because it was so far above the usual earnestness of expression on such subjects, was in his case the result of a deliberate system.

Garrison said that the world blinded conscience and made false issues with itself by the habitual calling of things by the wrong names; that there was no kind of vice which might not be disguised under a polite phrase. Theft might be spoken of as an ingenious transfer of property—adultery as a form of the elective affinity, and so on, but that all such phraseology had an immoral tendency.

In like manner the stealing of men and women from Africa—the systematic appropriation of all the fruits of their industry and labor—was robbery. Whoever did this was a thief.

Garrison called slaveholders, no matter of what rank in society, of what personal amiabilities and virtues, man-thieves. Whoever formed union with slaveholders, united with man-thieves, and as the partaker in law is judged as being a thief, those who united with man-thieves became themselves thieves.

Having reasoned this out logically, Garrison steadily and systematically applied these terms wherever he thought they applied. The Garrisonian tract, "The church a den of thieves," is a specimen of this kind of logic, and this unsparing use of terms. Whatever may be thought of the justice of such reasoning or the propriety of such logical application of terms, we still wish the fact to stand out clear, that these denunciations were not boiled up by heated passions, but reasoned out by logic, and that it was a part of a systematic plan to bring back the moral sense of society by a habit of calling things by discriminating names. Thus in the Liberator every agent of the United States who helped to catch and return a slave was always spoken of as a kidnapper—all defences of the fugitive slave law were familiarly denominated defences of kidnapping. Theodore Parker, in his sermons about the time of the fugitive slave law, makes very effective use of these terms, and it is not to be denied that the habit of thus constantly using language which in a word makes a moral discrimination is a very powerful influence in forming popular opinion.

People will boggle a great while about fulfilling constitutional obligation when catching a slave is put in those terms, but when it is put as "kidnapping," the question becomes far more direct and simple. The Garrisonians doubtless were philosophical in the precision of the moral nomenclature they adopted, and their success in stimulating drugged and paralyzed moral sentiment was largely owing to it.

To be sure, in the application of wholesale moral syllogism to particular individual cases, there was often something that appeared extremely hard and unjust to the individual. When an amiable northern Doctor of Divinity, who never owned a slave in his life and never expected to, found himself cited in the Liberator by the familiar designation of a man-thief, because he had been in the General Assembly, good naturedly uniting with a large body of southern slaveholders in suppressing all inquiry into their great systematic robbery, the northern Doctor was naturally indignant and so were all his friends and adherents.

To be sure it was only a skillful turning of that syllogistic crank by which New England theology demonstrated that every individual not conscious of a certain moral change of heart, was a malignant enemy of God, and had not a spark of moral excellence of any kind, no matter what sort of a man he might be, or what moral virtues he might practice.

Garrison simply reversed the crank and turned this unsparing kind of logic back on the church and clergy, who felt some of the surprise and pain of the eagle in the fable who found himself shot through by an arrow feathered from his own wing; and in both cases it may be doubted whether great moral syllogisms do not involve many instances of individual and personal injustice.