Barring the extreme plainness of speech with which Wright and Tappan gave their advice to Mr. Garrison, it was in the main singularly sound and wise.  But the pioneer did not so regard it.  He was possessed with his idea of the importance of chastising the clerical critics, and of the duty of the Executive Committee and of the Emancipator to back him in the undertaking.  His temper was, under all circumstances, masterful and peremptory.  It was never more masterful and peremptory than in its management of this business.  The very reasonable course of the Board at New York suggested to his mind a predominance of “sectarianism at headquarters,” seemed to him “criminal and extraordinary.”  As the Executive Committee and its organ would not rebuke the schismatics, he was moved to rebuke the Executive Committee and its organ for their “blind and temporizing policy.”  And so matters within the movement against slavery went, with increasing momentum, from bad to worse.

The break in the anti-slavery ranks widened as new causes of controversy arose between 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