, _par excellence_, of spread-eagle oratory,
when the American Bird soared higher and staid up longer than he ever
has since. Hail Columbias and Star Spangled Banners were in order, but
the latter waved for the white portion of the people only. A flaunting
mockery, our flag justly merited the reproach of other nations that
pointed to our enslaved millions and then said: "Call ye that the Land
of the Free and the Home of the Brave?"

We know that all this is so, for we remember it; but the student of
the future must get his knowledge from books, and in the light of
progress what will he think of defenseless women being mobbed in a
Connecticut town for allowing Negro girls to attend their school? Even
now there is no distinction of color in _our_ schools, and at the High
School in this city, a colored girl has graduated whose foster father
was a slave in Danville, Virginia, while the head master of the school
was held there a prisoner of war. Side by side they sit in our schools
of all grades, and, graduating from our Normal Schools, become
teachers in the schools themselves. He will read that Garrison,
Phillips, Foster and others, were often in peril of their lives for
preaching liberation of the slaves; and how like a myth will it seem
to _him_, when _we_, in twenty-five years from the death of John
Brown, have seen colored men in both branches of the National
Legislature, and to-day cannot look upon a lately issued Government
Note without reading the name of one[A] who was once in bondage.
Popular prejudice, the strongest barrier possible, is rapidly
yielding; and the bayonet, the ballot and the spelling book, have
wrought wonders. With all professions open to the colored man, with
equal rights before the law, with millions of property accumulated
since the war, who shall say that the soul of John Brown is not
marching on?

In the days prior to those of Harper's Ferry Raid, this good City of
Worcester, and the County of the same name, had spoken in no uncertain
manner as to their appreciation of Slavery and its attendant evils.
The first county in the Commonwealth to raise the question of the
validity of Slavery in Massachusetts subsequent to the adoption of the
Constitution, she well sustained her early acquired reputation in the
more troublous times of later years. In 1839, in this city was tried
the famous Holden Slave Case, where a native of Worcester County had
brought to her early home from her more recent Sout