eached the settled opinion that it was worth
more to the cause dead than alive. Such a soul, so masterful in its
treatment of the body, was likely to march on without it. And it did in
the years that followed, This Abolitionist raider, with a rashness
often sublime in its devotion, precipitated the national crisis which
issued in the Civil War and Emancipation.

There are lives of brave men which set us thinking for the most part of
human power and skill: we watch bold initiators of some wise policy
carrying their enterprise through with indomitable courage and
in-exhaustible patience, and we are lost in admiration of the hero.
But there are other brave lives which leave us thinking more of unseen
forces which impelled them than of their own splendid qualities. They
never seem masters of destiny, but its intrepid servants. They shape
events while they hardly know how or why; they seem to be rather driven
by fate than to be seeking fame or power. They go out like Abraham,
'not knowing whither they go,' only that, like him, they have heard a
call. Sometimes they sorely tax the loyalty of their admirers with
their eccentricities and their defiance of the conventions of their
age. Wisdom is only justified of these, her strange children, in the
next generation. Prominent among such lives is that of John Brown.
The conscience of the Northern States on the question of slavery needed
but some strong irritant to arouse it to vigorous action, and, the
hanging of John Brown sufficed.

The institution of slavery became both ridiculous and hateful to
multitudes because so good a man must be done to death to preserve it.
The verdict of Victor Hugo, 'What the South slew last December was not
John Brown, but slavery,' found an echo in many minds. And when the
long, fierce conflict, through which Emancipation came, was begun, the
quaint lines,

John Brown's body lies mouldering in the grave,
But his soul is marching on,

became one of the mightiest of the battle-songs which urged the Federal
hosts to victory. His name kindled the flame of that passion for
freedom which made the cause of the North triumphant, and there was awe
mingled with the love they bore his memory. Perhaps no man had been
oftener called with plausible reason a fool; but those who knew the
single-hearted devotion to a great cause of this ready victim of the
gallows came reverently to think of him as 'God's fool.' When they
sang 'John Brown died th