The Vermont Antimasonic state convention of 1830 wrestled with the same question. Its committee brought in a report so naively suggestive as to merit notice. Citing the agitation that arose on account of the literary efforts of “Robison and Barruel in Europe, and Morse, Payson, and others in America,” the committee expressed its judgment that those works “called Masonry in question in a manner which if assumed on any other topic, would have called forth disquisition and remark on the subject matter of these writings from every editor in the union; yet the spirit of inquiry, which these able performances were calculated to raise, was soon and unaccountably quelled—the press was mute as the voice of the strangled sentinel and the mass of the people kept in ignorance that an alarm on the subject of Masonry had ever been sounded, or even that these works had ever existed.” See _Proceedings of the Anti-Masonic State Convention, holden at Montpelier, June 23, 24, & 25, 1830. Reports and Addresses._ Middlebury, 1830. An exploration of the literature of the Antimasonic party yields nothing more significant. This literature as listed by McCarthy may be found on pp. 560–574 of the _Report of the American Historical Association for 1902_, vol. i. FOOTNOTES: [862] Mackey, _Lexicon and History of Freemasonry_, pp. 183 _et seq._ One of the most active and influential New England Masons of the period was the Reverend William Bentley. The following references in his _Diary_ throw light upon this phase of the situation: vol. ii, pp. 6–8, 11, 12. _Cf._ also Myer’s _History of Free Masonry and Its Progress in the United States_, p. 15.