- cles. But the views in them were much too independent
to please the ordinary person, and it failed.
Garrison had always had a strong tendency to question authority—he was not going to take anybody's word for a thing without thinking it all out for himself—as a boy he had taken up the cause of liberty wherever it had arisen and had been greatly moved by the struggles of the Greeks to throw off Turkish tyranny. But now again he was a printer in search of work, and after hard times he became the editor of a temperance paper, The National Philanthropist, in Boston, and then again the proprietor of a newspaper called The Journal of the Times. Once more he showed himself to be very much ahead of people in moral matters. In a number of this paper he wrote a forcible article on a law which had been passed in one of the States of America against teaching the blacks to read and write. He said how pitiable it was to seal up the mind and intellect of man to brutal incapacity.
"This state of things," he declared with vehemence, "must come to an end." The article drew the attention to him of a much older man—Benjamin Lundy—an excellent Quaker who had for some years past been agitating against slavery, and he now got into touch with Garrison. Garrison was deeply moved by Lundy's preaching, and equally disgusted with the attitude of the clergy, to whom Lundy appealed in vain.
