oan of Arc.
Garrison said that it would make two million abolitionists. In Paris it
was compared to Dumas' _The Three Guardsmen_ as a popular _tour de
force_. Others detected in it a resemblance to Rousseau's _Nouvelle
Heloise_. One pleaded for the liberty of the slave, the other for the
rights of the peasant. But I knew that the book was not really true. It
forefronted the brutality of slavery, it minimized the benevolent
aspects of the institution, which I had myself seen. It was written with
intensity of feeling, with the revivalist's method and emotion. It was
like her brother's sermons, and equally unauthentic. Yet how strangely
was this book received. It won Macaulay and Longfellow and George Sand,
and stirred the heart of Heine. It exasperated the South. The winds of
destiny previously let loose were blowing madly now.

In the midst of my own cares I awoke one morning to read that Douglas
was on his way to Cuba. The thought went through my mind, why not take
Dorothy and go in order to give her the benefit of this summer climate
through the winter? As Douglas had traveled by way of New Orleans he had
stopped in Memphis and I read in the _Tribune_ what he had said to the
people there: "If old Joshua R. Giddings should raise a colony in Ohio
and settle down in Louisiana he would be the strongest advocate of
slavery in the South; he would find when he got there that his opinion
would be very much modified; he would find on those sugar plantations
that it was not a question between the white man and the negro, but
between the negro and the crocodile. You come right back to the
principle of dollars and cents."

At New Orleans he had uttered the God of nature doctrine: "There is a
line or belt of country meandering through the valleys and over the
mountain tops which is a natural barrier between free territory and
slave territory, on the south of which are to be found the productions
suitable to slave labor, while on the north exists a country adapted to
free labor alone. But in the great central region, where there may be
some doubt as to the effect of natural causes, who ought to decide the
question except the people residing there, who have all their interests
there, who have gone there to live with their wives and children?"

No recognition of a right and a wrong, to be sure. But no express
advocacy of a wrong. I could not see then, and have never been able to
see since, why Douglas with this practical facing of t