Nevertheless, the danger of this propaganda was recognised, and before long the Abolitionists were being stoned and shot, their presses smashed, and their meetings broken up; a “broadcloth mob” put a rope round the neck of the editor of the _Liberator_ and dragged him through the streets of the city. And still, in spite of this, the agitation went on. All the “cranks” of the country gradually rallied about the movement. Their leader was a woman’s suffragist, an infidel, a prohibitionist, and a vegetarian; he denounced the Constitution as “an agreement with Death, and a covenant with Hell.” There was one man among them who addressed meetings with clanking chains about his wrists, and a three-pronged iron slave-collar about his neck; and who declared to the people of a town that they “had better establish among them a hundred rum-shops, fifty gambling-houses and ten brothels, than one church.” They allowed Negroes to speak on the platform with them, and they opened schools for Negro girls, or tried to, until these were broken up. One of them refused to pay taxes to a slave-holding government, and went to jail for it. Assuredly, no common-sense person would have thought that here was anything save a madness that might be allowed to run its course. Yet the Abolitionists kept at it. In the election of 1840, a wing of them split off, and nominated a candidate for the Presidency, who received seven thousand votes out of a total of two or three millions. Four years later, when the Democratic Party was on the verge of forcing the country into a war with Mexico, they raised a hue and cry that this was a “slave-driver’s enterprise,” with the result that their vote went up to sixty-two thousand. And by keeping up the ceaseless agitation all through the war, and taking advantage of a factional quarrel in New York state to nominate a politician who came into their camp for the sake of revenge, they cast, in 1848, a vote of two hundred and ninety-one thousand. And also they had by this time succeeded in colouring a great mass of the popular thought with their views. They had gotten the country unsettled; they had made people feel that something was wrong, and all sorts of anti-slavery measures were beginning to be championed. Some wanted to exclude slavery from the new Territories; some wanted to exclude it from the National Capital; some wanted to restrict the domestic slave-trade. All of these people, of course, denied indignantly that they were Abolitionists, denied that they had any sympathy with Abolitionism, or that their measures had anything to do with it. But the South, whom the matter concerned, understood perfectly well the folly of such a claim—understood that the institution of Slavery was one which could not be made war upon, or limited, and that the first hostile move which was made against it would necessarily mean its downfall. Hence, to the South, all these people were “Abolitionists.”