A practical difficulty soon became obvious. Some, meaning to pledge money to the State Society, found their pledge received as to the National Society--others, meaning to sustain the National, found their pledge recorded as to the State; and great confusion, both in the accounts of the agents, and in the minds of abolitionists, was the consequence. Notwithstanding this, the work went most encouragingly forward;--all being delighted with the efficiency of the National Society, however inconvenient and depressing, in a business sense, its mode of operation might be, and however the action of the State Society was paralyzed by the labors of its financial agents. Still it was thought that some arrangement might be devised by which to obviate the uncertainty and inconvenience which the double draft of funds occasioned; and at the last quarterly meeting of the Massachusetts Society in 1835, a committee was appointed to consider the subject. They reported that the then existing arrangements were very embarrassing to the Massachusetts Society; but no plan was adopted for more convenient ones. This was the situation and bearing of the fiscal arrangements at the beginning of 1836. Meanwhile the grand battle had been going powerfully on, and the energies of all were severely tasked. The enthusiasm for the cause had overleaped not only sectarian divisions, but the “graceful feebleness,” which the age cherished as an ornament in the female character. The women of the cause, in the difficult times of 1835, were peculiarly active. They devoted themselves to the work of obtaining signatures to petitions with commendable energy. A history of their progress from door to door, with the obstacles they encountered, would be at once touching, ludicrous, and edifying. Young women, whose labors depended on public opinion, laid the claims of the enslaved to freedom before those whose simple word might grant or deny their own means of subsistence. Benevolent-looking elderly gentlemen, individuals of the highest respectability and influence in the community, were wont to witness the appeal kindly, favoring the applicant with good advice as to her future course. “My dear young lady, it gives me pain to see your efforts so entirely wasted. You only injure the cause you espouse by thus leaving your sphere. You actually prevent those who are capable of understanding this question, and whom their sex points out as the only proper persons to consider it, from entering upon its consideration. You make the whole matter seem little, and below the attention of men.” But the women judged for themselves, and very rationally too, that the women whose efforts for the cause could not be hindered by men, were more valuable auxiliaries than the men whose dignity forbade them to be fellow-laborers with women.