Prior to Garrison's trial the paper
had fallen into great stress for want of money. Lundy and he had made a
division of their labors, the latter doing the editorial and office
work, while the former traveled from place to place soliciting
subscriptions and collecting generally the sinews of war. But the
experiment was not successful from a business standpoint. For as
Garrison playfully observed subsequently: "Where friend Lundy could get
one new subscriber, I could knock a _dozen_ off, and I did so. It was
the old experiment of the frog in the well, that went two feet up and
fell three feet back, at every jump." Where the income of the paper did
not exceed fifty dollars in four months and the weekly expenditure
amounted to at least that sum, the financial failure of the enterprise
was inevitable. This unhappy event did actually occur six weeks before
the junior editor went to jail; and the partnership was formally
dissolved in the issue of the _Genius_ of March 5, 1830. But when Arthur
Tappan made his generous offer of a hundred dollars to effect Garrison's
release, he made at the same time an offer of an equal amount to aid the
editors in reestablishing the _Genius_. This proposition led to hopes on
the part of the two friends to a renewal of their partnership in the
cause of emancipation. And so Garrison's visit to the North was taken
advantage of to test the disposition of Northern philanthropy to support
such a paper.
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