The active members of the anti-slavery society who controlled the policy of the _Standard_ were divided in their judgment of the value of Lowell’s contributions. Those who like Mr. Gay himself were thoroughly in earnest, but held their minds open on other sides than the north-north-east, regarded Lowell as an important acquisition. His fame was growing, and he could have found a ready market for his wares if he had chosen to turn them to the best commercial account, but he cheerfully gave his time and thought to a paper which was always in an impecunious condition, so that the editor found it hard enough to pay the very moderate stipend agreed upon. Lowell, as we have seen, hated to be paid for his services to the anti-slavery cause, and never complained of the inadequacy of his salary; but he took a rational view of the case, and accepted what the paper could give, not measuring his own contributions by the meagre standard of his pay. Nor did he show any sensitiveness when his work came under editorial stricture. The intensity of feeling which possessed the anti-slavery men who were in the thick of the fight made them abnormally critical of those who seemed in any way to hold back, and when Lowell wrote a long review, with hearty praise, of a new volume of Whittier’s poetry, signing it with his initials, Mr. Gay did not scruple to prefix an editorial note, in which he denounced Whittier for his course in 1840, when he refused to follow the lead of those abolitionists who insisted upon the acceptance of women delegates at the London convention. The quarrel then aroused led to a break in the unity of the anti-slavery group. “Older abolitionists,” wrote Gay, “cannot forget what Lowell cannot be aware of, that in the struggle of 1840, which was a struggle of life and death to the anti-slavery cause, Whittier the Quaker was found side by side with the men who would have sacrificed that cause to crush, according even to their own acknowledgment, the right of woman to plead publicly in behalf of the slave.” Lowell took the matter quietly enough: “I could not very well say less, and you could not say more,” was his comment.