ally the first one, than any equal number of words ever put to
music in America. Put in one sum the times the name of Lincoln, the
Martyred President, and Grant, the Peerless General have been uttered,
and it would not make a hundredth part the number that represents the
utterance of John Brown's name in this song. Some one will say it
cannot be a National Hymn unless sung by all parts of our people.
Millions of people in the South, true of dusky faces, sung it, and how
they sung it. It is more than sentiment, it is life to them; and I am
sanguine enough to believe that the time will come when those who wore
the gray on our Great Contest will so far have seen the error of their
position as to join with us of the other side in singing

"Glory, Glory, Hallelujah,"

over the fact that the soul of John Brown is marching on.

What think ye of John Brown? Have the widely separated opinions of
twenty-five years ago approached or are they even more divergent? Of
course, the active thinkers and workers of that day have joined the
great majority. A younger and later generation has the conduct of
affairs. In the main, those who hated him then hate him now. Those who
thought him a martyr then are sure of it now. Perhaps we are still too
near the events that made him famous to properly weigh and criticise
the evidence; but what we write now, with what has been written, must
be the source of future conclusions. As to the South, it is far too
early to expect other than the most rancorous feeling towards him.
More than many of us are willing to admit, we are the creatures of our
surroundings, men, thinking and acting as we have been reared. John
Brown put himself in direct opposition to all that made the South
distinctive; and, however much I may blame the section for its
continued hold on Slavery, I cannot think it strange that the
inhabitants looked upon the Liberator with feelings quite the reverse
from ours. For those, however, of equal privileges with ourselves, of
substantially the same rearing, I have not the same measure of
charity. In 1880 one G.W. Brown, M.D., of Rockford, Illinois, formerly
the editor of a paper in Kansas, gave himself the trouble to write a
pamphlet in which he spares no effort to calumniate the Old Hero. I
quote a notice of it from the _Boston Journal_:

"The writer, Dr. G.W. Brown, in slip-shod and often
ungrammatical English assails the memory of Old John Brown,
charges him with activ