Archibald H. Grimke, William Lloyd Garrison the Abolitionist

[286] one end, the Executive Committee and the Emancipafor 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