At that moment of general and anxious effort for the payment of the pledge, private circulars were issued by Mr. Phelps, in behalf of the publishing committee of the new paper, in which he urged men to devote _all_ their funds to its establishment, for this, among other reasons, that they would _then_ know what became of their money. This showed the origin of the rumors which had been circulated, that the Massachusetts Society fraudulently permitted its funds to be used to sustain the Liberator; and that it paid an editorial stipend--(“a fat salary” as the term was,) to Mr. Garrison. These reports, false as they were, came with an ill grace from those who, it is to be hoped unknowingly, received from Mr. James Boutelle, one of their agents, money entrusted to him for the payment of the pledge, but who appropriated it to the “Massachusetts Abolitionist.” All these labors were in vain.--The pledge was redeemed, against all opposition. Next came the Annual Meeting of the National Society, where men from all the States met to consult for the good of the cause. In full National Assembly, they resisted the idea that a difference of mind respecting forms of government was a disqualification for membership in the Society. They preserved inviolate the ancient broad foundation. They resisted, as the Massachusetts Society had done, any attempt to deprive women of their constitutional and inalienable right “to know, and utter, and to argue freely,” in this National Council. A resolution was also reported by the financial committee of the Society, that thirty-five thousand dollars was as large a sum as could be advantageously placed at the disposal of the Executive Committee during the year; as they deemed that more could be effected for the cause by a local than by a central expenditure. The Society also earnestly requested the Executive Committee to send no agents into the States, except with the advice of the State Societies. This salutary measure was strenuously opposed by those connected with the new paper in Massachusetts. Previous to the meeting, they labored personally and by correspondence, to secure the attendance of such as would co-operate with them for the exclusion of women, and of the non-resisting members. The Executive Committee, too, were, some of them, no less active to the same effect. Mr. Birney issued an article in the Emancipator, the organ of the whole Society, and sustained from its treasury, in which he asserted not only that a part of the members were unfitted, by their religious principles, for a place in the Society, but argued the merits of their principles _per se_, representing them as identical with those of the bloody and licentious Anabaptists of the sixteenth century.