During this period, then, much had been accomplished. Not only had the Germans turned their backs upon slave-holding, but the Friends, brought to perceive the iniquity of the practice, had ceased importing slaves, and for the most part had ceased buying them. It was another generation before the conservative element could be brought to advance beyond this position. It was not so easy to make them give up the slaves they already had. The succeeding period was characterized by an inevitable struggle which ensued between considerations of economy and ethics. The attitude of many Friends was that in refusing to buy any more slaves they were fulfilling all reasonable obligations. Sometimes there was a desire to hush up the whole matter and get it out of mind. Isaac Norris tells of a meeting that was large and comfortable, where the business would have gone very well but for the warm pushing by some Friends of Chester in the matter of negroes. But he adds that affairs were so managed that the unpleasant subject was dropped.[214] What would have been the result of this disposition cannot now be known; but it proved impossible to smooth matters away. There had already begun an age of reformers, forerunners by a hundred years of Garrison and his associates, men who were content with nothing less than entire abolition. The first of the abolitionists was William Southeby of Maryland, who went to Pennsylvania. For years the subject of slavery weighed heavily upon his mind. As early as 1696 he urged the Meeting to take action. His petition to the Provincial Assembly in 1712 asking that all slaves be set free was one of the most memorable incidents in the early struggle against slavery. But the Assembly resolved that his project was neither just nor convenient; and his ideas were so far in advance of the times that not only did he a little later lose favor among the Friends, but long after it was the judgment that his ill-regulated zeal had brought only sorrow.[215] The next in point of time was Ralph Sandiford (1693-1733), a Friend of Philadelphia. His hostility to slavery was aroused by the sufferings of negroes whom he had seen in the West Indies; and his feeling was so strong that on one occasion he refused to accept a gift from a slaveholder. In 1729 he published his _Mystery of Iniquity_, an impassioned protest against slavery. Although threatened with severe penalties if he circulated this work, he distributed it wherever he felt that it would be of use.[216] Such enmity did he arouse that he was forced to leave the city.[217] His work was carried forward by Benjamin Lay (1677-1759), an Englishman who came from Barbadoes to Philadelphia in 1731. He too aroused much hostility by his violence of expression and eccentric efforts to create pity for the slaves. He gave his whole life to the cause, but owing to his too radical methods he was much less influential than he might have been.[218]