Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Ill ON THE FIRING LINES The first great fact persistently thrust upon the attention of every investigator of the story of slavery in America is the tremendous and wide-spreading power that always pertains to great profits. Profits seem to breed their own power and miraculously to emanate it; and from small profits to great the degree of power generated seems to increase in geometrical ratio. In our own day we have seen clearly enough and often enough how apparently irresistible is the power put forth by the Controlling Interests that reap most of the huge profits of the existing system; and the power exerted by the 35 per cent, profits of slavery was akin to this. As in our own day, secret, insidious influences started from the seat of profits and ran out of sight across the country until they echoed in some print or pulpit for the benefit of the profit- makers and the injury of anybody that attacked them. Exactly what the Socialists are to-day in the columns of the kept press the Abolitionists were sixty years ago. The spirit of profits has changed not at all and the tactics have changed but little. Every man that offends them is still a liar and a scoundrel; still every exposition of their thievery and graft is extravagance, falsehood and vituperation; and still all the forces of education, the press, literature and the church are employed to overwhelm with discredit whomsoever shall stand and clamor for justice. Exactly so it was with the Abolitionists, and the heaviest burden of the hatred they aroused fell upon Phillips. To read now what was said of him, even in the Northern press, between 1837 and 1861, you would think, if unenlightened, that you were reading of a man incapable of telling the truth about anything and given over to depraved and wanton designs against…