Phillips grew increasingly disturbed by the “powerful contrasts” he encountered between “wealth beyond that of fairy tales, and poverty, bare and starved at its side.” The misery that Phillips believed “bad laws and bad religion alike” had fastened on the bulk of Europe’s population violated all his Yankee assumptions about how a free society ought to work. It “saddens one here at every step,” he informed Garrison. “In our country, the same contrasts exist, but they are not as yet so sharply drawn as here. The moral stagnation and death … only makes us value more highly the stirring arena at
...more
