Once more Garrison's influence was to determine him. The general inclination toward humanitarian reform had stirred him to the establishment of the _Liberator_, and when he declared, "I am in earnest--I will not equivocate--I will not excuse--I will not retreat a single inch--AND I WILL BE HEARD," he found a natural ally in Whittier. The great step came in 1833 with the poet's publication at his own expense of the pamphlet "Justice and Expediency," with its wider circulation through reprints by sympathizers, with the controversial sequels, and with his share in the founding of the American Anti-Slavery Society. In the years to come he said, "I set a higher value on my name as appended to the Anti-Slavery Declaration of 1833, than on the title-page of any book." It was the deepest test of courage. In the first place it meant that a sensitive young poet who had already felt the injustice of the conservative classes must lay himself open to their contempt and ridicule. It was a bitter time to do this, for never was a day when the miscellaneous inclination to reform offered so great an array of amusing causes and champions. Emerson's derisive list, "Madmen, madwomen, men with beards, Dunkers, Muggletonians, Come-outers, Groaners, Agrarians, Seventh-Day-Baptists, Quakers, Abolitionists, Calvinists, Unitarians and Philosophers," is evidence of the degree to which the general idea of reform had been discredited even in the most liberal minds. For there is no doubt that many of the projects were foolish or that the hopes reposed in them as social cure-alls were ridiculous. But the adoption of the abolition cause involved far more than ridicule--nothing less than the completest disapproval of most good citizens. Considered in the large, lawyers and clergymen are conservatives by profession, deeply committed to the past; and here was slavery sanctioned in the law and the gospel. The prosperous merchant and banker are never markedly eager for a change from the conditions which have fostered their prosperity; and here was a whole economic system, from the plantations of the South to the financial houses of Wall Street and State Street, erected on a foundation of slave labor. According to Emerson cotton thread held the Union together. Men might devote their lives to the substitution of hooks and eyes for buttons or the adoption of a vegetarian diet, and get their pay in laughter, but when they threatened to disturb the industrial system they were pelted and hated and cursed. All this Whittier foresaw when he followed his own counsel of later years, "My lad, if thou wouldst win success, join thyself to some unpopular but noble cause." The history of his participation in the abolition movement does not belong to such a chapter as this except for a record of how he used his literary powers for the good of the cause, and for a comment on the kind of poetry that inevitably resulted from such use.