TOEFL Practice Test - 9
William Lloyd Garrison
By: Archibald H. Grimke
Archimedes with his lever desired a place to stand that he might move the
world of matter. [William Lloyd] Garrison with his paper, having found a
place for his feet, demonstrated speedily his ability to push from its solid
base the world of mind. His plan was very simple, viz., to reveal slavery as it
then existed in its naked enormity, to the conscience of the North, to be "as
5) harsh as truth and as uncompromising as justice." And so, week after week,
he packed in the columns of the Liberator facts, the most damning facts,
against slaveholders, their cruelty and tyranny. He painted the woes of the
slaves as if he, too, had been a slave. For the first time the masters found a
man who rebuked them as not before had they been rebuked. Others may
10)
have equivocated, but this man called things by their proper names, a
spade, a spade, and sin, sin. Others may have contented themselves with
denunciations of the sins and with excuses for the sinner, as a creature of
circumstances, the victim of ancestral transgressions, but this man offered
no excuses for the slave-holding sinner. Him and his sin he denounced in
15) language, which the Eternal puts only into the mouths of His prophets.
It was, as he had said, "On this subject I do not wish to think, or
speak, or write, with moderation." The strength and resources of his mother-tongue
seemed to him wholly inadequate for his needs, to express the transcendent
wickedness of slave-holding. All the harsh, the stern, the terrible and
tremendous energies of the English speech he drew upon, and launched at
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slaveholders. Amid all of this excess of the enthusiast there was the method
of a calculating mind. He aimed to kindle a conflagration because he had
icebergs to melt. "The public shall not be imposed upon," he replied to one
of his critics, "and men and things shall be called by their right names. I
retract nothing, I blot out nothing. My language is exactly such as suits me;
25) it will displease many, I know; to displease them is my intention." He was
philosopher enough to see that he could reach the national conscience only
by exciting the national anger. It was not popular rage, which he feared but
popular apathy. If he could goad the people to anger on the subject of
slavery he would soon be rid of their apathy. And so week after week he
30) piled every sort of combustible material, which he was able to collect on
board the Liberator and lighting it all, sent the fiery messenger blazing
among the icebergs of the Union. Slaveholders were robbers, murderers,
oppressors; they were guilty of all the sins of the decalogue, were in a word
the chief of sinners. At the same moment that the reformer denied their
35) right of property in the slave, he attacked their character also, held them up
in their relation of masters to the reprobation of the nation and of mankind
as monsters of injustice and inhumanity. The tone which he held toward
them, steadily, without shadow of change, was the tone of a righteous man
toward the workers of iniquity. The indifference, the apathy, the pro-slavery
sympathy and prejudice of the free States rendered the people of the North hardly less culpable.
