nearest to the mind of Thomas Jefferson. And the
sense of his superiority is increased when, seizing his opportunity, he
proceeds to offer a commentary on the Declaration in its bearing on the
Negro Question so incomparably lucid and rational that Jefferson himself
might have penned it.

In the following year an incident occurred which is of some historical
importance, not because, as is sometimes vaguely suggested, it did
anything whatever towards the emancipation of the slaves, but because it
certainly increased, not unnaturally, the anger and alarm of the South.
Old John Brown had suspended for a time his programme of murder and
mutilation in Kansas and returned to New England, where he approached a
number of wealthy men of known Abolitionist sympathies whom he persuaded
to provide him with money for the purpose of raising a slave
insurrection. That he should have been able to induce men of sanity and
repute to support him in so frantic and criminal an enterprise says much
for the personal magnetism which by all accounts was characteristic of
this extraordinary man. Having obtained his supplies, he collected a
band of nineteen men, including his own sons, with which he proposed to
make an attack on the Government arsenal at Harper's Ferry in Virginia,
which, when captured, he intended to convert into a place of refuge and
armament for fugitive slaves and a nucleus for the general Negro rising
which he expected his presence to produce. The plan was as mad as its
author, yet it is characteristic of a peculiar quality of his madness
that he conducted the actual operations not only with amazing audacity
but with remarkable skill, and the first part of his programme was
successfully carried out. The arsenal was surprised, and its sleeping
and insufficient garrison overpowered. Here, however, his success ended.
No fugitives joined him, and there was not the faintest sign of a slave
rising. In fact, as Lincoln afterwards said, the Negroes, ignorant as
they were, seem to have had the sense to see that the thing would come
to nothing. As soon as Virginia woke up to what had happened troops were
sent to recapture the arsenal. Brown and his men fought bravely, but the
issue could not be in doubt. Several of Brown's followers and all his
sons were killed. He himself was wounded, captured, brought to trial
and very properly hanged--unless we take the view that he should rather
have been confined in an asylum. He died with the her