Letters
I thank you very much for sending me your biography of Garrison.
Reading it, I lived again through the spring of my awakening to true life. While reading Garrison's speeches and articles, I vividly recalled to mind the spiritual joy which I experienced twenty years ago, when I found out that the law of non-resistance - to which I have been inevitably brought by the recognition of the Christian teaching in its fullest meaning, and which revealed to me the great joyous ideal to be realised in Christian life - was even as far back as the forties not only recognised and proclaimed by Garrison (about Ballou I learnt later), but also placed by him at the foundation of his practical activity in the emancipation of the slaves.
My joy was at the time mingled with bewilderment as to how it was that this great Gospel truth, fifty years ago explained by Garrison, could have been so hushed up that I had now to express it as something new.
My bewilderment was especially increased by the circumstances that not only people antagonistic to the progress of mankind, but also the most advanced and progressive men, were either completely indifferent to this law, or actually opposed to the promulgation of that which lies at the foundation of all true progress.
But as time went on, it became clearer and clearer to me that the general indifference and opposition which were then expressed, and still continue to be expressed - pre-eminently amongst political workers - towards this law of non-resistance are merely symptoms of the great significance of this law.
"The motto upon our banner," wrote Garrison in the midst of his activity, "has been from the commencement of our moral warfare "OUR COUNTRY IS THE WORLD; OUR COUNTRYMEN ARE ALL MANKIND" We trust that it will be our only epitaph. Another motto we have chosen is "UNIVERSAL EMANCIPATION". Up to this time, we have limited its application to those who in this country are held by Southern taskmasters as marketable commodities, goods and chattels, and implements of husbandry. Henceforth we shall use it in its widest latitude - the emancipation of our whole race from the dominion of man, from the thralldom of self, from the government of brute force, from the bondage of sin, and the bringing it under the dominion of God, the control of an inward spirit, the government of the law of love..."
Garrison, as a man enlightened by the Christian teaching, having begun with the practical aim of strife against slavery, very soon understood that the cause of slavery was not the casual temporary seizure by the Southerners of a few millions of negroes, but the ancient and universal recognition, contrary to Christian teaching, of the right of coercion on the part of certain people in regard to certain others. A pretext for recognising this right has always been that men regarded it as possible to eradicate or diminish evil, by brute force. i.e., also by evil. Having once realised this fallacy, Garrison put forward against slavery neither the suffering of slaves, nor the cruelty of slaveholders, not the social equality of men, but the eternal Christian law of refraining from opposing evil by violence; i.e., of "non-resistance". Garrison understood that which the most advanced among the fighters against slavery did not understand; that the only irrefutable argument against slavery is the denial of the right of any man over the liberty of another under any conditions whatsoever.
The Abolitionists endeavoured to prove that slavery was unlawful, disadvantageous, cruel; that it depraved men, and so on; but the defenders of slavery in their turn proved the untimeliness and danger of emancipation, and the evil results liable to follow it. Neither the one nor the other could convince his opponent. Whereas Garrison, understand that the slavery of the negroes was only a particular instance of universal coercion, put forward a general principle with which it was impossible not to agree - the principle that under no pretext has any man the right to dominate, i.e., to use coercion over his fellows.
Garrison did not so much insist on the right of negroes to be free, as he denied the right of any man whatsoever, or of any body of men, forcibly to coerce another man in any way. For the purpose of combating slavery, he advanced the principle of struggle against all the evil of the world.