[3] A scheme so called, for benefiting the colored race, without giving offence by the mention of Freedom, or Human Rights.
CHAPTER IV. THE WARNING.
The task of such an editor, Mr. President, is an arduous and thankless one. He must shield his friends by movements for which they will be apt to censure him. He must save the cause by the very blows from which the apparently judicious will anticipate its annihilation. He must stand on an eminence from which he can see what other men cannot see. He must be eyes to the blind, whose want of eye-sight will lead them to make war upon their benefactor. He must rouse men from their dangerous sleep, who, while they begin to see men as trees walking, will murmur because they are waked, and instead of thanking their deliverer, find fault with the rudeness that disturbed them, and assume to give directions when they should be beginning to learn. William Goodell.
Time, which waits for no man, but keeps on, with even foot-fall, whether witness of right or wrong, frankness and openness, or chicanery and intrigue, brought round the year 1839.
Mr. Torrey, who had represented his county as crying out for a new paper, till possibly the echo of his own voice might have led him to think his testimony true, now found a feeling waking up in Old Essex that he had not anticipated. The women there, with whom, in the spirit of a true mussulman, he had, a few months previous, considered it defilement to sit in Convention, had always been most effectual helpers of the financial department of the cause. Some of them had been among the earliest laborers; and, experienced in observing the pertinacity with which the enemy, from the beginning, had striven to possess himself of the fortress, by striking down the warder of the gate, were startled by Mr. Torrey’s great zeal for a new paper. They compared it with his hatred of the Liberator, so manifest during the clerical appeal controversy, and took note, from time to time, of the manner in which he argued this new necessity.
They found that, like the Colonization Society, the necessity had two faces; one for the real and the other for the pretended abolitionist. They saw that this “necessity” was founded on prejudice against the Liberator, as the Colonization Society rests upon prejudice against the free man of color.
“Oh, surer than suspicion’s hundred eyes,
Is that fine sense, which, to the pure in heart,