BY HON. MOORFIELD STOREY, PRESIDENT OF THE ANTI-IMPERIALIST LEAGUE OF U.S.

"This celebration comes at a fortunate hour. We are passing through a reaction against the great principles of freedom and equal rights to advance which Mr. Garrison devoted his life, and we need assured faith. We need to be reminded how much can be accomplished in a good cause by courage, persistence and unwavering devotion against odds which seem to be overwhelming-how certain is the triumph of right. In 1828 when Benjamin Luudy, the humble saddler of Ohio, traveled on foot to Vermont that he might persuade a young printer to "join him in the work of seeking the abolition of slavery" nothing could have seemed more impossible than that these apparently institution of slavery-an institution fortified by the Constitution, defended by the pulpit and the bar, guarded by the great financial interests which rested upon it and must be ruined by its overthrow, and protected by the instinctive feeling of a peace-loving people that social disorder and possible disunion would follow any serious attack upon it. The love of money, the love of peace, the love of country, were allied to maintain it. Worse than all was "the frozen apathy" on the subject which more prevalent in New England than in the slave States themselves, led Garrison to establish "The Liberator" in Boston. Against this gigantic evil deeply rooted in the life of the nation, what could a man or a handful of men without money and without social or political influence hope to accomplish?

"Yet with no arms but his pen and his voice, with no funds and without a single subscriber to support his newspaper, Garrison attacked the monstrous wrong, and for a generation urged unrelenting war against it. Poverty and hardship, abuse, execration and contempt, the jail, the mob, and the danger of violent death, never appalled him nor turned him from his purpose.

"It is altogether fitting that we should honor a man of this rare mold. He deserves all the honor we can pay him, but it is not by eulogies or meetings or statues that we honor him best, but by following his example and showing something at least of his constancy and courage.

"The equal rights of men, which, when he died seemed assured in this country, are again questioned. In many states American citizens are denied the right to vote on account of their color. There and elsewhere they are exposed to lawless violence, are subjected to cruel punishments without trial, are visited with social indignities, are denied the equal opportunity which is the birthright of every man, are taunted with inferiority, while many insist that they are and of right must be forced to remain hewers of wood and drawers of water, incapable of higher things. Let us learn from the example of Garrison to resist persistence the ignorant and un-Christian prejudice with is responsible for those wrongs.

"Our task compared with Garrison's is easy. We have seen slavery overthrown. We have learned that all the strong forces once enlisted in its support were unable to keep 4,000,000 of men as slaves. Can we believe for a moment that any force can deep 1,000,000 of free men down in a country where everything that they can see and everything that they can hear strengthens the impulse to rise, which is planted in the breast of every human being at his birth? Where he gave his whole life can we not each give at least a few hours? Where he 00021made himself heard and felt in season and out of season, can we not speak as an opportunity offers? Is there not now"a frozen apathy" that we can help to stir? The occasional word of many men creates public opinion which is irresistible. Let us persevere in the path which Garrison opened for us until every an in his great country, the world, has an equal opportunity to be and to do whatever his powers permit, unfettered by law and unhampered by prejudice, looking forward to the day when mankind shall rise to his high plane, and we shall all say with him: "My country is the world. My countrymen are all mankind." (Applause.)

BY HON. ALBERT E. PILLSBURY, EX-ATTORNEY GENERAL OF MASSACHUSETTS.

Fellow Citizens: I dislike to make any allusion to race distinctions, which I would ignore and forget if I could, but where are the white men who ought to fill this hall today? Does not the memory of Garrison belong also to them: Do they not know that the emancipation for which he gave his life was more theirs than yours? Where is that fellow citizen of ours who many be described as the white American? Has he forgotten the way to Faneuil Hall? There was a time when he knew it. I came down here last Saturday evening to help save the old frigate Constitution, and I found the hall filled, and the platform covered, with Irishmen. (Laughter.) Coming here today to celebrate Garrison, I find the occasion wholly in the hands of another class of our fellow citizens, who, to say the least, would have great difficulty in tracing their descent from the Pilgrim or the Puritan. (Laughter.) Does not the white man know that any question of liberty is his question? Does he not know that a question of equal rights is more his question than yours, in the proportion of nine or ten to one? Does he not know that his rights are not safe so long as yours are not secure?

But this is not what I came here to say. I wish to make today, if I can, a practical application of Garrison's example. Garrison was the great agitator. The bronze figure down yonder in Commonwealth avenue is a monument to the power of agitation, the marshalling of the conscience of the country to mould its laws, as Peel called it. It is sometimes said by historians and others who know no better that the abolitionists contributed but little to the downfall of slavery. But Garrison set at work, long before the slave power made the fatal mistake of firing the shot against Sumter, the forces which were to destroy slavery. He saw its weakest point, and he drove straight at it. The slave power always laughed at the political and economic arguments against it. Calboun, the ablest defender of the system, was acute enough to see that slavery could survive only upon the ground that it was right. Garrison put aside all questions of policy or expediency, and demanded immediate and unconditional emancipation because slavery was wrong. Then the slave power knew that he had pierced the joint in its armor. The recoil from Garrison's blow, the blind and furious rage in which the whole slavocracy rose up to demand his suppression and to put a price upon his life, was proof enough that the blow had gone home to the vital part.

Garrison lived to see the constitutional amendments wipe out slavery, raise the black man to the level of citizenship, and clothe him with its rights and privileges. Now, within less than thirty years from his death, the clouds have gathered over the enfranchised race, and there is today a call for a new prophet of freedom. The white south refuses to accept the Negro as a man and a citizen. It is nothing that he poured out his own blood in a hundred battles for the government which now turns its back up on him. All that is forgotten. The moral wave that culminated with the Emancipation Proclamation and the 13th Amendment has subsided. The public conscience is asleep. the country looks on with indifference while the Negro is stripped not merely of his right to vote but of his right to live as a free man and citizen. He must live by the labor of his hands, and the ballot is the only weapon by which he can defend his right to work on equal terms with others who have it. (Applause.) Take it away and you leave him a slave in fact, if not in law. By this process the black man is being remanded to servitude, and the white man as well, for when the thing is done it puts the whole country under political subjection to the law-defying 00032states. (Applause.) The courts evade the question, congress finds no politics in it, trade, selfish and mercenary now as it always is, encourages it, and the law of the land is set aside, by force or by fraud, for one-ninth of all the citizens of the Untied States.

The work that Garrison began is not yet done. (Applause.) It must be done by agitation, with fire kindled at the same altar. (Applause.) It must be done by the black man himself. (Applause.) "Who would be free, themselves must strike the blow." In Garrison's time the Negro was property, without even a tongue of his own. Now he is at least a man, whose right to speak for himself cannot be denied or suppressed. When Garrison began, he had to begin by unmasking the whole public opinion of the time, and the whole body of laws. Now the law is with the persecuted race, and it needs only public opinion to enforce it. Create this public opinion and every politician will bow to it like a reed in the wind.

If the white race has for the time abandoned the Negro to his fate, let him take his own cause into his own hands. they are equal to it, I have read within a few days a pamphlet on this subject, produced wholly by Colored men, in which there is more logic, more philosophy and more statesmanship than the white race, north or south, has developed since the constitutional amendments. You have no need to look abroad for leaders. If the Colored race will stand together, sinking all jealousies and differences in a resolute and unceasing demand for the impartial enforcement of the laws, giving the country no rest until there is one rule alike for white and black over every foot of soil, there can be no doubt of the result. (Applause.) It is only a question of courage and endurance. If the demand is irrepressible, it will prove to be irresistible. (Applause.) The people have never failed, in the end, when appealed to on a question of fundamental right. The universal instinct of freedom will respond to the appeal. The whole history of mankind is the history of a struggle for freedom, in which there is no backward step. All the moral forces of the universe, the very stars in their courses, fight on the side of a race striving after its own liberty. In that cause there may be delay and discouragement, but there is no defeat. (Applause.)

BY REV. DR. A. A. BERLE, PASTOR OF CONGREGATIONAL CHURCH, SALEM, MASSACHUSETTS.

The negro race, whatever it once was, is here as an integral part of American citizenship. And it is here not to be reckoned with primarily as a charge, primarily as an issue, but primarily as a body of American citizens, and as an American who expects to exercise his suffrage as an American a few years longer, I refuse to regard my countryman either as a charge, as a problem or as an issue. I propose to regard him as a citizen and as a citizen alone. (Applause.) I think that wise words of advice were the words already spoken by my friend, Mr. Pillsbury, when he said that the Negroes of America must act as a unit. And they must act together and bring the entire wealth of mind and thought and spirit and conscience which the total race possesses to bear upon their own problem of development and advancement. there is a question, however, as to purchasing unity upon a platform upon which the unity is not worth having. (Applause). Believing as I do that the problem of education is a problem for us all, I believe that industrial education is essential to the black man and the white man alike. But I refuse to believe that any portion of American citizens is to be permanently set apart for mere industrial improvement. (Applause.) What is the question, the problem, that is agitating the white race? The industrial question. What is the great terror that is stirring us all? Triumphant, insistent, repressive industrialism. Are you willing that a recently emerged race shall be handed, bound hand and foot, into the arms of the industrial monster? (Great applause.) I say this because I believe that you can never permanently separate in this land the black man from his citizenship. Why do we have demonstrative exhibitions like this here? We have them because we have the monstrous spectacle of a race practically submerged and deprived of its national citizenship, condemned to involuntary servitude in America.

Now, my dear friends, to me it is a 00043perfectly natural development of this condition that the theory widely embraced south and north that the Negro race needs primarily to be fitted for industrial occupation should receive the endowment of a conspicuous figure in AN INDUSTRIAL TRUST. (Great applause.) I want to say to you this afternoon that if I were a Negro as I am a white man; if I were with you in the traditions which belong to the Negro race. I WOULD SPURN ANY PLATFORM OF UNITY THAT FIRST HAD TO SPURN TILE CONSTITUTION OF THE UNITED STATES. (Great applause.) The denominational organ of that to which I belong said the other day that the days of the radicals were over, and I suppose in some sense that is true. But let us at least remember that it does not lie in the power of any man or any set of men permanently to hold down the truth in unrighteousness. And I simply came this afternoon to bid you God-speed on the line for which Garrison stood. And let me say to you that in spite of all I may seem to have implied by what I have said, make no mistakes. You will have to advance industrially. I am sorry for any man, white or black, who does not know the use of his hands. But I want to say, while you advance, God help your race, as God only apparently can help any race, AS LONG AS IT STICKS BY THE MONSTROUS DEGRADING MAIM, 'GET MONEY IN THE BANK." (Wild applause.) I will say to you what we must do is to hark back to the primary platform which is embodied in the United States Constitution. And when we have made citizenship mean what it is supposed to mean in every part of this hand you will not need the endowment of any millionaire to set your schools in motion, because free men build their own schools and educate their own children, themselves. (Prolonged applause.)

BY MR. EDWARD H. CLEMENT, EDITOR IN CHIEF OF THE BOSTON TRANSCRIPT.

I rise here simply to put in a word of caution against our falling into the tone of self-complacency over Garrison's vast achievement, as though it were something we had done, or something that we are emulating. Most common is this self-granulation without any decently adequate foundation. Our Fourth of July oratory for a hundred years has flattered us that we struck out here, once and for all, the free institutions of our pride, whereas the truth is that in that we are but the successors and heritor of ages of human progress. Our representative government was largely worked out for us in England on its basic lines; we have but carried it a little further. Had we been trained, as the Japanese show us they have been trained, in a religion actually and vitally governing daily conduct, and that one of the Ten Commandments which adjures us to honor our fathers and our aged, had developed something like that worship of ancestors which inspired their struggle and led them after their triumph to attribute the victory to the merits of the fathers and the system they built up and consolidated through their long history, in the very character and conditions of the people-we should be less in danger of falling into this deadening complacency, and be apter to recognize that there is as much challenging us that needs manhood and martyrdom, as there was challenging Garrison. He did not rest content with the measure of freedom achieved for the American people by Washington and Franklin and Adams and Jefferson fifty years before his day, as we are resting content and rather self-congratulatory on what was done by Garrison and Harriet Beecher Stowe and John Brown and Phillips and Sumner, fifty years before this day.

There is plenty of opportunity and plenty of call for the "hard language" which Garrison admitted he was accustomed to use because "he had not been able to find a soft word to describe villainy or to identify the perpetrator of it." Even as regards his specialty of rescuing the Negro from oppression almost everything remains to be done over large sections of our country,- indeed in our own community as well, in the social prejudices of cold hearts and narrow minds. As the Negro rises, the force of gravitation of the base habits of thought of the average masses pulls the harder against him. At the hour when he had barely risen out of slavery we were establishing his citizenship and his equality in rights in the Constitution and the statutes. Today the civil 00054rights are waste paper and the repeal of his guarantees of citizenhood in the Constitution is openly agitated. Is there not as much reason for us as for Garrison to dedicate ourselves as he did to trust in God with the defiant faith:-"We may be personally defeated but our principles never." Is there not as much necessity to cry that we will not equivocate, that we will be heard? Shall we not rise to his conception of duty that the obligation to do a righteous act is not at all dependent on the question whether we shall succeed in carrying the multitude with us?

My only point is that we have no business with his glory today if we have none of his spirit. If we are proud and grateful on his birthday that such an American was produced by our state and city, I say, let us express our sense of this great man we honor in more than lip-service. If we see around us "men wearing their chains in a cowardly and servile spirit." as he described the conservatism of his day, let us as advocates of peace, avow, as he did, that "we would much rather see them breaking the head of the tyrant with their chains," whether the tyranny be embodied in the benighted and belated Negrophobia of the south, or in the bossism of northern municipal corruption, or in the monopolies of capitalized privilege by grace of bought legislation, or in the zeal of religious darkness and bigotry. The only way to estimate the true greatness of Garrison is to reflect that the opportunity for his career is never wanting, never has been, and, till the millennium, never will be, and yet his triumph remains unique-unparalleled in starting as small as was Garrison's beginning and ending as stupendous-with the whole of the material and moral and financial resources of the nation practically arrayed under his standard against his selected object of destruction. The elements of his problem are never absent. These elements are, entrenched wrong, the vested interests which thrive upon it, the cold-blooded indifference of those whose withers are unwrung, the timidity and selfishness of all who dread disturbance of established order, the fear of ridicule for the unpopular minority-the consequent inertia of the mass, most terrible of all resistance to overcome. But there is no use to pursue the threadbare story now. The thing for us to think of here today is that the opportunity and the call for martyrdom is the same today as then, for you and me as for him. The question up to us is, Where is the hero of the hour? Who are they that are doing in our day the same sort of pioneering, with the same sacrificed and stripes, that Garrison did? Let us beware, as we join in the execration of some agitator who is called a dangerous disturber, a low fellow to be got rid of and silenced somehow, lest we be running with a "broadcloth mob" again, and stoning a prophet unawares.

BY MISS P.E. HOPKINS, AUTHOR OF "CONTENDING FORCES" "HAGAR'S DAUGHTER""WINONA" ETC.

The conditions which gave birth to so remarkable a reformer and patriot were peculiar. The entire American republic had set itself to do evil, and its leading forces, wealth, religion and party, joined the popular side and threatened the death of Liberty in the Republic. But the darkest hour was but a herald of the dawn. No great reform was ever projected or patronized by any powerful organization or influential individual at the outset. Reformation always begins in the heart of a solitary individual; some humble man or woman unknown to fame is lifted up to the level of the Almighty's heartbeats where is unfolded to him what presently must be done. Thus it was that after the imposition of the colonization scheme, the issuing of Walker's "Appeal," and his own imprisonment at Baltimore, the poor and obscure Newburyport printer's boy, without reputation, social or political influence, or money, inaugurated the greatest reform of the nineteenth century, and within one year of the first issue of the "Liberator," the entire country knew the name of garrison. God had heard the prayers of suffering humanity. He said "enough." The hour struck on the horologe of Eternity, and the man was there. Side by side with Martin Luther's "Here I take my stand," is the "I will be heard" of William Lloyd Garrison. (Applause.)

In September, 1834, we are told that the Reformer received the greatest individual help that ever came to him 00065during his life, when he married Miss Eliza Benson, daughter of a venerable philanthropist of Rhode Island, and thereafter woman's subtle, intuitive instinct added another sense to the wonderful powers of this remarkable man. Very shortly after their marriage, this brave woman was called to view the mobbing of her husband by the Boston "Broadcloth Mob." She stepped from a window upon a shed at the moment of his extremest danger, being herself in danger from the rioters. His hat was lost, and brickbats were rained upon his head, while he was hustled along in the direction of the tar-kettle in the next street. The only words that escaped from the white lips of the young wife were: "I think my husband will not deny his principles; I am sure my husband will never deny his principles." The same spirit of encouragement still exists in women. What dangers will not a woman dare for the support and comfort of husband, father or brother? Not so long ago, when a Boston young man of color was hustled and beaten and jailed for upholding free speech and independent thought, he was sustained and comforted by the words of a sister:" Remember, this is not disgrace, but honor. It is for principle-it is for principle."

Mr. Garrison went about his work against slavery with tremendous moral earnestness. At first he advocated gradual emancipation, but after his baptism of injustice in a Baltimore jail his sentiments changed to the startling doctrine of immediate and unconditional emancipation. Gradual emancipation was a popular and inoffensive doctrine, a safe shore from which to view freedom for the Blacks. It is analogous with the startling propaganda of disfranchisement, or gradual enfranchisement after the Afro-American hag proved himself fit for the ballot. We remember that history records the broken promises of freedom given by the Southern States to the blacks of Southern regiments in the Revolutionary War. those men earned their freedom, proved their right to manhood, but at the close of the war were told that, "You have done well, boys, now get home to your masters." The time will never come for the enfranchisement of the black if he depends upon an acknowledgement from the south of his worthiness for the ballot. (Applause.) As if the faithfulness of the black man to this government from the Revolution until this day, the blood freely shed to sustain Republican principles in every war waged against the Republic, the gentle, patient docility with which we have borne every wrong, were not proof of our fitness to enjoy what is right. (Applause.)

Mr. Garrison lived to see his cause triumph in the emancipation of the slave, and died believing that the manhood rights of every citizen of the United States were secured then and forever. But the rise of a younger generation, the influence of an unconquered south, and the acquiescence of an ease-loving north that winks at abuses where commercial relations and manufactures flourish and put money in the purse, have neutralized the effects of the stern policy of these giants of an earlier age.

Great indeed was the battle for the abolition of slavery, but greater far will be the battle for manhood rights.

Let us hope that this timely review of the noble words and deeds of Garrison and his followers, may rekindle within our breasts the love of liberty. Were Mr. Garrison living in this materialistic age, when the price of manhood is a good dinner, a find position, a smile of approval and a pat on the back from the man of influence, of a fat endowment, again, would he cry aloud, "The apathy of the people is enough to make every statue leap from its pedestal, and to hasten the resurrection of the dead."

Here in Feneuil hall, let us vow, as the greatest tribute we can pay to Mr. garrison's memory, to keep alive the sacred flame of universal liberty in the Republic for all races and classes, by every legitimate means, petitions to individuals, to associations, to foreign governments, to legislatures, to congress, print and circulate literature, and let the voice of the agent and lecturer be constantly heard. Let us swear to be "as harsh as truth, and as uncompromising as justice." And let us bear in mind the beauty of doing all things for the upbuilding of humanity; persecution and intellectual development have broadened us until we can clearly see that if the blacks are downed in the fight for manhood, no individual or race will be safe within our borders. This government has welded all races into one great nation until now, what is good for the individual member of the body politic is good for all, and vice versa. Here where the south and its sympathizers have so strenuously denied the brotherhood 00076of man, by our mixed population, God has proved his declaration, "Of one blood have I made all races of men to dwell upon the whole face of the earth together." This truth Mr. Garrison and his followers freely acknowledged in the beauty and purity of their lives and deeds.

BY PROF. A. B. HART, PROFESSOR OF AMERICAN HISTORY IN HARVARD UNIVERSITY.

We have heard a great deal today about the future and about the present, and it is right to weave the future into the present. But as I came into this hall something else had come into my mind. It is the figure of a man whom I never saw, yet whom all of us have seen, the personality of that great character whose 100th birthday we have come here to celebrate. One hundred years ago today that man first saw the light. Seventy years ago today, almost to a day, a public meeting was held in this hall, presided over by the then mayor of Boston, to protest against William Lloyd Garrison. And at that meeting Peter Chandler pointed to this picture of Washington as a slave- holder, forgetting that slave-holder by his last will did what he could to repair the wrong that had been done to those people who had served him, by setting them free. In that meeting, Otis criticized the abolitionists as a set of incendiaries.

How is it that that man has exercised such a mighty influence upon his country and has come to be one of the acknowledged masters in our great republic? Mr. Garrison saw what other people failed to see-that the truth should make you free. (Applause.) The whole basis of Mr. Garrison's power was not that he could create a situation, not that it was in his power to set free the slaves, but that they were by nature free. And what he set out to do and what he succeeded in doing was simply to call the attention of his countrymen to the truth which lay before them all-a truth so mighty that it burst the bonds in which men had attempted to envelop it. Furthermore, Mr. Garrison stood for a principle for which every man, woman and child in America owes him thanks on this, his 100th birthday, namely the principle that there is no offence to anybody in telling the truth and in telling it in public.

Among the arguments put forth at that time was that on one side the Negro race was a poor, weak, servile race, and that ont he other side it was a race so strong and powerful that you could not whisper in the hearing of a slave that he ought to be free without deluging the country in blood and breaking up the whole institution itself. That contradiction was carefully expressed by Mr. Garrison. If the Negro was poor and weak, where was the danger from him? If he was strong and powerful, where was the right that he should be held a slave?

This man, so strong, was after all a man of kindness, of simplicity of heart. He not only hated the sinner and the oppressor, but he loved the oppressed.

The world is advanced by the man of one idea, the men who have the strength and power to fill their minds with one subject. I feel, therefore, grateful today for Mr. Garrison, not because he was always right, because if Mr. Garrison and his friends were always right, then my father and grandfather were often wrong. (Laughter). I am willing to divide the responsibility. Not because he was always just; he was often hard and terrible. But because he had in him such a belief in the rightfulness of his cause that he must speak and the people before him must listen to him. I admire Mr. Garrison; I am proud to appear here today upon this anniversary because he justified what he said of himself. " I have flattered no man."

BY MR. GEORGE G. BRADFORD, BANKER, FORMERLY TRUSTEE OF ATLANTA UNIVERSITY.

It was given to Garrison to be in his day and generation one of the chief instruments under God to abolish human slavery. It is given to us in our day and generation to perfect the work of emancipation by assuring to the freedmen the fullest enjoyment of the rights, privileges and responsibilities of citizenship. It may not be given to any of us to be a Garrison, but it is given to each of us to do, in him humble way, the duty that lies at his hand with his courage, resolution and unselfishness.

In looking to Garrison for inspiration, we must look always to the man rather than to his methods, we must remember that his great influence was due to the power of his personality, rather than to any method employed.

If we would prove ourselves worthy followers of Garrison, if we would perfect the work he began we must prove ourselves likewise fearless and resolute self-sacrificing men of action.

As illustration of the sort of action which in my judgment worthily expresses the Garrison love of liberty and makes for freedom, I want to take up your time a moment by referring to one or two incidents familiar to most of you.

Once a citizen of Boston was denied by the school authorities the right to send his children to a public school to which he wished to send them. By sheer force of a dogged determination to have that which he believed was his right under the law, he compelled the school authorities to admit his children to the desired school. he thereby not only served himself but served the community by his example of sturdy independent citizenship.

There fled to Massachusetts a fugitive from the injustice of a southern state. The Colored men of Massachusetts rallied in his defence and resisted by every legal means in their power his extradition. They failed in their immediate object. The fugitive was returned south, but the resolute concerted action on the part of the Colored people of Massachusetts was notice to the community at large that the Colored men of Massachusetts were united in a steadfast purpose to protect the individual members of their race from oppression and injustice.

An attempt was made in western Massachusetts to establish separate public schools for white and Colored children. Again the Colored men of Massachusetts, chiefly men of Boston united to resist the attempt. This time their action was successful.

It is such action on the part of individuals and groups of individuals which keeps alive the true spirit of independence and freedom and justice in our midst.

Looking to other cities we find other men of action striving mightily, Hart of Washington, striking an effective blow at the jim crow car law; Morris of Chicago, scoring another against the jim crow restaurant. While more encouraging of all came, some time back, word that the Colored citizens of Jacksonville, men, women and children, had banded together and effectively boycotted the jim crow cars of that city and that a similar concerted movement was literally on foot in two towns in Texas. With such civic virtue, such sturdy spirit of independence, there can be no question of the ultimate result.

00098

Issued by Garrison Centenary Committee of the Boston Suffrage League, Boston, Mass, January 1906