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CHAPTER XVII.
AS IN A LOOKING GLASS.
Garrison was the most dogmatic, as he was the most earnest of men. It
was almost next to impossible for him to understand that his way was not
the only way to attain a given end. A position reached by him, he was
curiously apt to look upon as a sort of _ultima thule_ of human endeavor
in that direction of the moral universe. And, notwithstanding instances
of honest self-depreciation, there, nevertheless, hung around his
personality an air and assumption of moral infallibility, as a reformer.
His was not a tolerant mind. Differences with him he was prone to treat
as gross departures from principle, as evidences of faithlessness to
freedom. He fell upon the men who did not see eye to eye with him with
tomahawk and scalping knife. He was strangely deficient in a sense of
proportion in such matters. His terrible severities of speech, he
visited upon the slave-power and the Liberty party alike. And although a
non-resistent, in that he eschewed the use of physical force, yet there
never was born among the sons of men a more militant soul in the use of
moral force, in the quickness with which he would whip out the rapiers,
or hurl the bolts and bombs of his mother tongue at opponents. The
pioneer must have been an unconscious believer in the annihilation of
the wicked, as he must have been an unconscious believer in the
wickedness of all opposition to his idea of right and duty.
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