d for treason against a State. We cannot
object, even though he agreed with us in thinking Slavery wrong. That
cannot excuse violence, bloodshed and treason. It could avail him
nothing that he might _think_ himself right."

Lincoln's voice was drowned in the roar of the mob.

John Brown from the scaffold had set in motion forces of mind beyond
control. Never before had men so little grasped the present, so stupidly
ignored the past, so poorly divined the future. Reason had been hurled
from her throne. Man had ceased to think.

Had Lieutenant Green's sword pierced Brown's heart he would have
died the death of a mad dog. His imprisonment, his carefully staged
martyrdom, his message of blood, and final, just execution by Law
created the mob mind which destroyed reverence for Law.

As he swung from the gallows and his body swayed for a moment between
heaven and earth Colonel Preston, standing beside the steps, solemnly
cried:

"So perish all such enemies of Virginia! All such enemies of the Union!
All such foes of the human race!"

Yet even as the trap was sprung, in the Capitol of the greatest State
of the North, the leaders of the crowd were firing a hundred guns as a
dirge for their martyr hero.

A criminal paranoiac had become the leader of twenty millions of people.
The mob mind had caught the disease of his insanity and a nation began
to go mad.

Robert E. Lee, in command of the forces of Law and Order, watched the
swaying ghostly figure with a sense of deep foreboding for the future.

CHAPTER XXXV

John Brown's body lay molderingin the grave but his soul was marching
on. And his soul was a thousand times mightier than his body had ever
been.

While living, his abnormal mind repelled men of strong personality.
He had never been able to control more than two dozen people in any
enterprise which he undertook. And in these small bands rebellions
always broke out.

The paranoiac had been transfigured now into the Hero and the Saint
through the worship of the mob which his insanity had created. His
apparent strength of character was in reality weakness, an incapacity to
master himself or control his criminal impulses. But the Jacobin mind of
his followers did not consider realities. They only cherished dreams,
illusions, assertions. The mob never reasons. It only believes. Reason
is submerged in passion.

John Brown was a typical Jacobin leader. He was first and last a Puritan
mystic. The God he wor