ific pressure of the problem of life at home too
keenly to go into hysterics over the evils of Negro Slavery in the
South. William Lloyd Garrison had been preaching his denunciations for
twenty-one years and its fruits were small. The masses of the people
were indifferent.

But a man was pushing his way to the platform of the little hall
to-night who was destined to do a deed that would accomplish what all
the books and all the magazines and all the newspapers of the Crusaders
had tried in vain to do.

Small as the crowd was, there was something sinister in its composition.
Half of them were foreigners. It was the first wave of the flood of
degradation for our racial stock in the North--the racial stock of John
Adams and John Hancock.

A few workingmen were scattered among them. Fifty or sixty negroes
occupied the front rows. Sam had secured a seat on the aisle. Gerrit
Smith rose without ceremony and introduced Brown. There were no women
present. He used the formal address to the American voter:

"Fellow Citizens:

"I have the honor to present to you to-night a man chosen of God to lead
our people out of the darkness of sin, my fellow worker in the Kingdom,
the friend of the downtrodden and the oppressed, John Brown."

Faint applause greeted the old man as he moved briskly to the little
table with his quick, springing step.

He fixed the people with his brilliant eyes and they were silent. He was
slow of speech, awkward in gesture, and without skill in the building of
ideas to hold the imagination of the typical crowd.

It was not a typical crowd of American freemen. It was something new
under the sun in our history. It was the beginning of the coming mob
mind destined to use Direct Action in defiance of the Laws on which the
Republic had been built.

There was no mistaking the message Brown bore. He proclaimed that the
negro is the blood brother of the white man. The color of his skin was
an accident. This white man with a black skin was now being beaten and
ground into the dust by the infamy of his masters. Their crimes cried
to God for vengeance. All the negro needed was freedom to transform him
into a white man--your equal and mine. At present, our brothers and
sisters are groaning in chains on Southern plantations. His vaulting
metallic tones throbbed with a strange, cold passion as he called for
Action.

The vibrant call for bloodshed in this cry melted the crowd into a new
personality. The mildest sp