There may he a thousand reasons why a particular individual ought not to do an act, though the act be innocent in itself.  It would be tyranny therefore in a society which can properly take notice of but one subject, slavery, to promulgate the doctrine that all its members ought to do any particular act, as for instance, to vote, to give money, to lecture, to petition, or the like.  The particular circumstances and opinions of each one must regulate his actions.  All we have a right to ask is, that he do for the slave’s cause as much as he does for any other of equal importance.  But when an act is wrong, it is no intolerance to say to the whole world that it ought not to be done.  After the abolitionist has granted that slavery is wrong, we have the right to judge him by his own principles, and arraign him for inconsistency that, so believing, he helps the slaveholder by his oath.

The following pages have been hastily thrown together in explanation of the vote above recited.  They make no pretension to a full argument of the topic.  I hope that in a short time I shall get leisure sufficient to present to our opponents, unless some one does it for me, a full statement of the reasons which have led us to this step.

I am aware that we non-voters are rather singular.  But history, from the earliest Christians downwards, is full of instances of men who refused all connection with government, and all the influence which office could bestow, rather than deny their principles, or aid in doing wrong.  Yet I never heard them called either idiots or over-scrupulous.  Sir Thomas More need never have mounted the scaffold, had he only consented to take the oath of supremacy.  He had only to tell a lie with solemnity, as we are asked to do, and he might not only have saved his life, but, as the trimmers of his day would have told him, doubled his influence.  Pitt resigned his place as Prime Minister of England, rather than break faith with the Catholics of Ireland.  Should I not resign a petty ballot rather than break faith with the slave?  But I was specially glad to find a distinct recognition of the principle upon which we have acted, applied to a different point, in the life of that Patriarch of the Anti-Slavery enterprise, Granville Sharpe.  It is in a late number of the Edinburgh Review.  While an underclerk in the War Office, he sympathized with our fathers in their struggle for independence.  “Orders reached his office to ship munitions of war to the revolted colonies.  If his hand had entered the account of such a cargo, it would have contracted in his eyes the stain of innocent blood.  To avoid this pollution, he resigned his place and his means of subsistence at a period of life when be could no longer hope to find any other lucrative employment.”  As the thoughtful clerk of the War Office takes his hat down from the peg where it has used to hang for twenty years, methinks I hear one of our opponents cry out, “Friend