The things of importance to the student of constitutional history in connection with these events are the increase of the Abolitionists in number, their organization into societies, the dissatisfaction of the Southerners with the unofficial, merely popular, way of dealing with the agitation at the North, and their demands upon the governments of the Northern Commonwealths to deal with the Abolitionists through the processes of their criminal law. So long as men only talk and write, it is the impulse of our Anglo-Saxon character to place no further restraint upon them than the law of slander and libel of private character imposes, no matter what may be, or may be thought to be, the ultimate consequences of acting according to what they may say or write. To deny this privilege to anybody appears like a deprivation of the liberty of speech and of the press, appears like persecution. There is no country in the world in which the making of martyrs is an easier procedure than in {251} the United States. Persecution is the soil in which new movements grow best, no matter what may be the character of the movement. [Sidenote: Growth of the Abolition movement.] In a single year from the date of the first number of Garrison's newspaper, _The Liberator_, that is, in January of 1832, the New England Anti-slavery Society was formed, and in December of 1833 the American Anti-slavery Society was organized, which soon established branches in many quarters. The exaggerated demands of the Southerners, that the Northern Commonwealths should forbid Abolition agitation by law, thus identifying the interests of slavery with the denial of the freedom of speaking and writing in the Northern Commonwealths, helped greatly to swell the ranks of the Abolitionists, and to mollify public opinion in the North against them. [Sidenote: The methods of the moderate Abolitionists.] The new Abolitionists were naturally of a more moderate type than Garrison, and most of them would listen only to regular legal methods for the accomplishment of their purposes. The quickening of the public opinion in the North, the conviction of the slaveholders themselves of the error, if not the sin, of slavery, and the appeal to the Government to do all within its constitutional powers against slavery, were the only means which many of them were willing to employ. Their petitions to Congress, and the transmission of their literature of Abolition to the Southerners through the United States mails, brought the whole question of their rights and purposes before the Government, and before the nation, for which that Government was bound to act with impartial justice to all its parts. [Sidenote: The Abolition petitions.]