What cared Christ for the jeers of the crowd? The palsied hand moved,
the blind saw, the leper was made whole, the dead spake, despite the
ridicule and scoffs of the spectators.

What cared Wendell Phillips for rotten eggs, derisive scorn, and
hisses? In him "at last the scornful world had met its match." Were
Beecher and Gough to be silenced by the rude English mobs that came to
extinguish them? No! they held their ground and compelled unwilling
thousands to hear and to heed. Did Anna Dickinson leave the platform
when the pistol bullets of the Molly Maguires flew about her head? She
silenced those pistols by her courage and her arguments.

What the world wants is a Knox, who dares to preach on with a musket
leveled at his head; a Garrison, who is not afraid of a jail, or a mob,
or a scaffold erected in front of his door.

When General Butler was sent with nine thousand men to quell the New
York riots, he arrived in advance of his troops, and found the streets
thronged with an angry mob, which had already hanged several men to
lamp-posts. Without waiting for his men, Butler went to the place
where the crowd was most dense, overturned an ash barrel, stood upon
it, and began: "Delegates from Five Points, fiends from hell, you have
murdered your superiors," and the bloodstained crowd quailed before the
courageous words of a single man in a city which Mayor Fernando Wood
could not restrain with the aid of police and militia.

"Our enemies are before us," exclaimed the Spartans at Thermopylae.
"And we are before them." was the cool reply of Leonidas. "Deliver
your arms," came the message from Xerxes. "Come and take them," was
the answer Leonidas sent back. A Persian soldier said: "You will not
be able to see the sun for flying javelins and arrows." "Then we will
fight in the shade," replied a Lacedemonian. What wonder that a
handful of such men checked the march of the greatest host that ever
trod the earth!

"It is impossible," said a staff officer, when Napoleon gave directions
for a daring plan. "Impossible!" thundered the great commander,
"_impossible_ is the adjective of fools!"

The courageous man is an example to the intrepid. His influence is
magnetic. Men follow him, even to the death.

Men who have dared have moved the world, often before reaching the
prime of life. It is astonishing what daring to begin and perseverance
have enabled even youths to achieve. Alexander, who ascended the
t