Mrs. Child’s popularity was reversed. Her writings on other subjects were no longer sought after with the avidity that was shown for them before the publication of her “Appeal.” Most of them were sent back to their publishers from the Southern bookstores, with the notice that the demand for her books had ceased. The sale of them at the North was also greatly diminished. It was said at the time that her income from the productions of her pen was lessened six or eight hundred dollars a year. But this did not daunt her. On the contrary, it roused her to greater exertion, as it revealed to her more fully the moral corruption which slavery had diffused throughout our country, and summoned her patriotism as well as her benevolence to more determined conflict with our nation’s deadliest enemy. Indeed, she consecrated herself to the cause of the enslaved. Many of her publications since then have related to the great subject, viz.: The Oasis, Antislavery Catechism, Authentic Anecdotes, Evils and Cure of Slavery, Other Tracts, Life of Isaac T. Hopper, and, more than all, her letters to Governor Wise, of Virginia, and to Mrs. Mason, respecting John Brown. Those letters had an immense circulation throughout the free States, and were blazoned by all manner of anathemas in the Southern papers. Her letter to Mrs. Mason especially was copied by hundreds of thousands, and was doubtless one of the efficient agencies that prepared the mind of the North for the final great crisis. For several years, assisted by her husband, Mrs. Child edited the _Antislavery Standard_, elevated its literary character, extended its circulation, and increased its efficiency. But, in a more private way, this admirable woman rendered the early Abolitionists most important services. She, together with Mrs. Maria W. Chapman and Eliza Lee Follen, and others, of whom I shall write hereafter, were presiding geniuses in all our councils and more public meetings, often proposing the wisest measures, and suggesting to those who were “allowed to speak in the assembly” the most weighty thoughts, pertinent facts, apt illustrations, which they could not be persuaded to utter aloud. Repeatedly in those early days, before Angelina and Sarah Grimké had taught others besides Quaker women “to _speak_ in meeting,” if they had anything to say that was worth hearing,--repeatedly did I spring to the platform, crying, “Hear me as the mouthpiece of Mrs. Child, or Mrs. Chapman, or Mrs. Follen,” and convulsed the audience with a stroke of wit, or electrified them with a flash of eloquence, caught from the lips of one or the other of our antislavery prophetesses.