We must pause here, and settle in our memories the positions of individuals and societies at this period, if we would understand the times which come after. We must take the bearings and distances of the cause in 1837, if we would possess a chart for our safe guidance among the shoals and quicksands of 1839. First, let us note the position of the Executive Committee at New York. Blind to the crisis or unequal to it, they labored to preserve neutrality in a case involving the preservation or the sacrifice of principle; and pronounced the whole affair to be “entirely local--a mere Boston controversy.” Of the three tests of fidelity, they stood firm under the application of but two. They were untrue to principles in keeping silence at such a moment, but they were not positively and openly faithless to men, and they vindicated the broad platform of the original Anti-Slavery agreement. They perceived the derangement that a hostile and proscriptive organization in Massachusetts would occasion in the whole Anti-Slavery system of organized action and did not recognize any such society as a part of the affiliation. But the feebleness that marked their course, at that trying crisis, deprived them of the _perfect_ love and confidence that had till then been felt in them by all the abolitionists. This feebleness and neutrality was, however, a recommendation to those whose estimation is a dispraise. The opposer of the cause instinctively felt that, without any change in his _own_ position, the distance between himself and the New York Committee was somewhat lessened: while the devoted friends were made aware that that committee, notwithstanding its activity in keeping in motion the smaller machinery of the cause, and its ability in conducting the tract and book department, was yet the weak point of the whole Anti-Slavery array. All attentive beholders, whether friends or foes, were taught, by the observation of this period, that the machinery of organization, with all its systematized and mechanical helps, must be utterly unequal to obtain emancipation, unless freedom be the moving “spirit within the wheels;”--that, however efficient may be the appliances and means that money can set in motion, there are moments when one trumpet-blast of victorious truth, were worth them all. The friends in Massachusetts in vain continued to “look southward with upbraiding eye;”--there was no voice nor any that answered to their condemnation of the base metal which could not stand the furnace of the times. They therefore made their own expression of opinion the more emphatic, and their own testimony the more clear.