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.