ion unparalleled."

The slave-ship is on her way, crowded with its dying victims; new
cargoes are being added in mid-ocean; a small crew of slaveholders,
countenanced by a large body of passengers, is smothering four millions
under the hatches, and yet the politician asserts that the only proper
way by which deliverance is to be obtained, is by "the quiet diffusion
of the sentiments of humanity," without any "outbreak." As if the
sentiments of humanity were ever found unaccompanied by its deeds, and
you could disperse them, all finished to order, the pure article, as
easily as water with a watering-pot, and so lay the dust. What is that
that I hear cast overboard? The bodies of the dead that have found
deliverance. That is the way we are "diffusing" humanity, and its
sentiments with it.

Prominent and influential editors, accustomed to deal with politicians,
men of an infinitely lower grade, say, in their ignorance, that he
acted "on the principle of revenge." They do not know the man. They must
enlarge themselves to conceive of him. I have no doubt that the time
will come when they will begin to see him as he was. They have got
to conceive of a man of faith and of religious principle, and not
a politician or an Indian; of a man who did not wait till he was
personally interfered with or thwarted in some harmless business before
he gave his life to the cause of the oppressed.

If Walker may be considered the representative of the South, I wish
I could say that Brown was the representative of the North. He was a
superior man. He did not value his bodily life in comparison with ideal
things. He did not recognize unjust human laws, but resisted them as
he was bid. For once we are lifted out of the trivialness and dust of
politics into the region of truth and manhood. No man in America has
ever stood up so persistently and effectively for the dignity of
human nature, knowing himself for a man, and the equal of any and all
governments. In that sense he was the most American of us all. He needed
no babbling lawyer, making false issues, to defend him. He was more than
a match for all the judges that American voters, or office-holders of
whatever grade, can create. He could not have been tried by a jury
of his peers, because his peers did not exist. When a man stands up
serenely against the condemnation and vengeance of mankind, rising above
them literally by a whole body,--even though he were of late the vilest
murderer, who