ttempting to rescue slaves. This is sowing the wind to
reap the whirlwind, which will soon come."

Any one who is interested in Lincoln is almost forced to linger over
the contrasting though slighter character who crossed the stage just
before he suddenly took the principal part upon it. Men like John
Brown may be fitly ranked with the equally rare men who, steering a
very different course, have consistently acted out the principles of
the Quakers, constraining no man whether by violence or by law, yet
going into the thick of life prepared at all times to risk all. All
such men are abnormal in the sense that most men literally could not
put life through on any similar plan and would be wrong and foolish to
try. The reason is that most men have a wider range of sympathy and of
intellect than they. But the common sense of most of us revolts from
any attitude of condemnation or condescension towards them; for they
are more disinterested than most of us, more single-minded, and in
their own field often more successful. With a very clear conscience we
refuse to take example from these men whose very defects have operated
in them as a special call; but undoubtedly most of us regard them with
a warmth of sympathy which we are slow to accord to safer guides. We
turn now from John Brown, who saw in slavery a great oppression, and
was very angry, and went ahead slaying the nearest oppressor and
liberating--for some days at least--the nearest slave, to a patient
being, who, long ago in his youth, had boiled with anger against
slavery, but whose whole soul now expressed itself in a policy of
deadly moderation towards it: "Let us put back slavery where the
fathers placed it, and there let it rest in peace." We are to study
how he acted when in power. In almost every department of policy we
shall see him watching and waiting while blood flows, suspending
judgment, temporising, making trial of this expedient and of that,
adopting in the end, quite unthanked, the measure of which most men
will say, when it succeeds, "That is what we always said should be
done." Above all, in that point of policy which most interests us, we
shall witness the long postponement of the blow that killed negro
slavery, the steady subordination of this particular issue to what will
not at once appeal to us as a larger and a higher issue. All this
provoked at the time in many excellent and clever men dissatisfaction
and deep suspicion; they longed f