He pursued the even tenor of his way, laboring at the case more than fourteen hours every day, except Sundays, upon the paper, renewing, week after week, his assaults upon the citadel of the great iniquity, giving no quarter to slave-holding sinners, but carrying aloft the banner of IMMEDIATE AND UNCONDITIONAL EMANCIPATION.

Otis had looked to numbers and respectability as his political barometer and cue; but when, after diligent search with official microscopes, he failed to observe the presence of either in connection with this "new fanaticism," wise man that he was, he turned over and renewed his slumbers on the edge of a volcano whose ominous rumbling the Southern heart had heard and interpreted aright.

He was too near to catch the true import of the detonations of those subterranean forces which were sounding, week after week, in the columns of the _Liberator_.

They seemed trivial, harmless, contemptible, like the toy artillery of children bombarding Fort Independence.

Garrison's moral earnestness and enthusiasm seemed to the Boston mayor like the impotent rage of a man nursing memories of personal injuries suffered at the South.
If there was panic in the South, there was none in the office of the _Liberator_.