Dear Aunt Sarah! these last words will make many smile who remember how scrupulously careful she was about spending more on her dress than was absolutely necessary to cleanliness and health.  Every dollar beyond this she felt was taken from the poor or from some benevolent enterprise.  The watchfulness of her friends was indeed needful!

It appears from the above correspondence that both Sarah and Angelina had become tinctured with the doctrines of “non-resistance,” which, within a few years, had gained some credit with a few “perfectionists” and active reformers in and about Boston.  They had been presented by Lydia Maria Child, a genial writer, under the guise of the Scriptural doctrine of love.  This sentiment was held to be adequate to the regulation of social and political life:  by it, ruffians were to be made to stand in awe of virtue; thieves, burglars, and murderers were to be made ashamed of themselves, and turned into honest and amiable citizens; children were to be governed without punishment; and the world was to be made a paradise.  Rev. Henry C. Wright, a man of some ability, but tossed by every wind of doctrine, embraced the new gospel.  He applied its principles to public matters.  From the essential sinfulness of all forms of force, if used towards human beings, he inferred that penal laws, prisons, sheriffs, and criminal courts should be dispensed with; that governments, which, of necessity, execute their decrees by force, should be abolished; that Christians should not take part in politics, either by voting or holding office; that they should not employ force, even to resist encroachment or in the defence of their wives and children; and that although slavery, being a form of force, was wrong, no one should vote against it.  The slave-holder was to be converted by love.  The free States should show their grief and disapprobation by seceding from the slave States, and by nullifying within their limits any unjust laws passed by the nation.  All governments, civil, ecclesiastical, and family, were to disappear, so that the divine law, interpreted by each one for himself, might have free course.  To this fanciful, transcendental, and anarchical theory, Mr. Wright made sundry converts, more or less thorough, including Parker Pillsbury, Wm. L. Garrison, and Stephen S. Foster.  That he took a good deal of pains to capture the subjects of our biography is evident.  He attended their lectures, cultivated their acquaintance, extended to them his sympathy, and made them his guests.  There are certain affinities of the non-resistance doctrines with Quakerism, which made them attractive to these two women who had little worldly knowledge, and who had been trained for years in the peace doctrines of the Philadelphia Friends.