een the management in Boston and the management at New York.
The Massachusetts Abolitionists had stood stanchly by Garrison against
the clerical schismatics. They also inclined to his side in his trouble
with the national board. Instead of one common center of activity and
leadership the anti-slavery reform began now to develop two centers of
activity and leadership. Garrison and the _Liberator_ formed the moral
nucleus at one end, the Executive Committee and the _Emancipator_ the
moral nucleus at the other. Much of the energies of the two sides were
in those circumstances, absorbed in stimulating and completing the
processes which were to ultimate in the organic division of the body of
the movement against slavery. When men once begin to quarrel they will
not stop for lack of subjects to dispute over. There will be no lack,
for before one disputed point is settled another has arisen. It is the
old story of the box of evils. Beginnings must be avoided, else if one
evil escapes, others will follow. The anti-slavery Pandora had let out
one little imp of discord and many big and little imps were
incontinently following.

Against all of the new ideas except one, viz., the idea of anti-slavery
political action, the New York leadership, speaking broadly, had opposed
itself. But as if by some strange perversity of fate, this particular
new idea was the only one of the new ideas to which the Boston
leadership did not take kindly. It became in time as the very apple of
the eye to the management of the National Society. And the more ardently
it was cherished by them, the more hateful did it become with the Boston
Board. It was the only one of the new ideas which had any logical
sequence from the Abolition cause. In a country where the principle of
popular suffrage obtains, all successful moral movements must sometime
ultimate in political action. There is no other way of fixing in laws
the changes in public sentiment wrought during this period of agitation.
The idea of political action was therefore a perfectly natural growth
from the moral movement against slavery. The only reasonable objection
to it would be one which went to show that it had arrived out of due
course, that its appearance at any given time was marked by prematurity
in respect of the reasons, so to speak, of the reform. For every
movement against a great social wrong as was the anti-slavery movement
must have its John-the-Baptist stage, its period of popular awak