If anti-slavery meetings made converts by tens, anti-slavery mobs made them by hundreds.

The enemies of freedom builded better than they knew or intended, and Garrison had the weightiest of reasons for feeling thankful to them for the involuntary, yet vast aid and comfort which their pro-slavery virulence and violence were bringing him and the anti-slavery movement throughout the free States.

Example: in 1835-36, the great mob year, as many as three hundred and twenty-eight societies were organized in the North for the immediate abolition of slavery.
The mob did likewise help towards a satisfactory solution of the riddle propounded by Garrison: "Shall the _Liberator_ die ?" The fresh access of anti-slavery strength, both in respect of zeal and numbers, begotten by it, exerted no slight influence on the longevity of the _Liberator_.
Poor the paper continued, and embarrassed the editor for many a month thereafter, but as an anti-slavery instrument its survival may be said from that proceeding to have become a necessity.

To allow the _Liberator_ to die at this juncture would have been such a confession of having been put down, such an ignominious surrender to the mobocrats as the Abolitionists of Boston would have scorned to make.

"I trust," wrote Samuel E.Sewall, "there will not be even one week's interruption in the publication of the _Liberator._" _Ex uno disce omnes_.