No time therefore was to be lost.

The letter was accordingly written, but as no answer was ever returned to it, they attributed this second omission to the same cause.
I do not really know whether interested persons ever did, as was suspected, intercept the letters of the committee to the two presidents as now surmised; or whether they ever dissuaded them from introducing so important a question for discussion when the nation was in such a heated state; but certain it is that we had many, and I believe barbarous, enemies to encounter.

At the very next meeting of the committee, Claviere produced anonymous letters, which he had received, and in which it was stated that, if the society of the Friends of the Negros did not dissolve itself, he and the rest of them would be stabbed.

It was said that no less than three hundred persons had associated themselves for this purpose.

I had received similar letters myself; and on producing mine, and comparing the hand-writing in both, it appeared that the same persons had written them.
In a few days after this the public prints were filled with the most malicious representations of the views of the committee.