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 awakening to the nature and enormity of sin and the duty of immediate repentance.

The anti-slavery enterprise was at the time of the controversy between the New York and the Boston Boards in this first stage of its growth.  It had not yet progressed naturally out of it into its next phase of political agitation.  True there were tendencies more or less strong to enter the second stage of its development, but they seem irregular, personal, and forced.  The time had not come for the adoption of the principle of associated political action against slavery.  But the deep underlying motive of the advocates of the third-party idea was none the less a grand one, viz., “to have a free Northern nucleus,” as Elizur Wright put it, “a standard flung to the breeze—­something around which to rally.”  Garrison probed to the quick the question in a passage of an address to the Abolitionists, which is here given:  “Abolitionists! you are now feared and respected by all political parties, not because of the number of votes you can throw, so much as in view of the moral integrity and sacred regard to principle which you have exhibited to the country.  It is the religious aspect of your enterprise which impresses and overawes men of every sect and party.  Hitherto you have seemed to be actuated by no hope of preferment or love of power, and therefore have established, even in the minds of your enemies, confidence in your disinterestedness.  If you shall now array yourselves as a political party, and hold out mercenary rewards to induce men to rally under your standard, there is reason to fear that you will be regarded as those who have made the anti-slavery cause a hobby to ride into office, however plausible or sound may be your pretexts for such a course.  You cannot, you ought not, to expect that the political action of the State will move faster than the religious action of the Church, in favor of the abolition of slavery; and it is a fact not less encouraging than undeniable, that both the Whig and Democratic parties have consulted the wishes of Abolitionists even beyond the measure of their real political strength.  More you cannot expect under any circumstances.”