at all, they were carefully restricted to the negro pew. As in the
Southern States to-day, no distinction was made among them in these
respects by virtue of dress or manners or culture or means; but all
were alike discriminated against because of their dark skins. Some
of Douglass's abolition friends, among whom he especially mentions
Wendell Phillips and two others of lesser note, won their way to his
heart by at all times refusing to accept privileges that were denied
to their swarthy companion. Douglass resented proscription wherever
met with, and resisted it with force when the odds were not too
overwhelming. More than once he was beaten and maltreated by railroad
conductors and brakemen. For a time the Eastern Railroad ran its cars
through Lynn, Massachusetts, without stopping, because Douglass, who
resided at that time in Lynn, insisted on riding in the white people's
car, and made trouble when interfered with. Often it was impossible
for the abolitionists to secure a meeting-place; and in several
instances Douglass paraded the streets with a bell, like a town crier,
to announce that he would lecture in the open air.

Some of Douglass's friends, it must be admitted, were at times rather
extreme in their language, and perhaps stirred up feelings that a
more temperate vocabulary would not have aroused. None of them ever
hesitated to call a spade a spade, and some of them denounced slavery
and all its sympathizers with the vigor and picturesqueness of a
Muggletonian or Fifth Monarchy man of Cromwell's time execrating his
religious adversaries. And, while it was true enough that the Church
and the State were, generally speaking, the obsequious tools of
slavery, it was not easy for an abolitionist to say so in vehement
language without incurring the charge of treason or blasphemy,--an old
trick of bigotry and tyranny to curb freedom of thought and freedom of
speech. The little personal idiosyncrasies which some of the reformers