mple had been followed by a hundred, or by thirty of his followers,
it would have greatly precipitated the era of freedom and justice. We
feel the misdeeds of our country with so little fervor, for we are not
witnesses to the suffering they cause. But when we see them awake an
active horror in our fellow-man; when we see a neighbor prefer to lie
in prison than be so much as passively implicated in their
perpetration, even the dullest of us will begin to realize them with a
quicker pulse."

In the feeling that a wrong, no matter how great, must fall before the
determined assault of a man, no matter how weak, Thoreau found the
reason for his action. The operation of the laws of God is like an
incontrollable torrent. Nothing can stand before them; but the work of
a single man may set the torrent in motion which will sweep away the
accumulations of centuries of wrong.

There is a long chapter in our national history which is not a glorious
record. Most of us are too young to remember much of politics under
the Fugitive Slave Law, or to understand the deference which
politicians of every grade then paid to the peculiar institution. It
was in those days in the Middle West that Kentucky blackguards, backed
by the laws of the United States, and aided not by Northern blackguards
alone, but by many of the best citizens of those States, chased runaway
slaves through the streets of our Northern capitals.

And not the politicians alone, but the teachers and preachers, took
their turn in paying tribute to Caesar. We were told that the Bible
itself was a champion of slavery. Two of our greatest theologians in
the North declared, in the name of the Higher Law, that slavery was a
holy thing, which the Lord, who cursed Canaan, would ever uphold.

In those days there came a man from the West--a tall, gaunt, grizzly,
shaggy-haired, God-fearing man, a son of the Puritans, whose ancestors
came over on the Mayflower. A dangerous fanatic or lunatic, he was
called, and, with the aid of a few poor negroes whom he had stolen from
slavery, he defied the power of this whole slave-catching United
States. A little square brick building, once a sort of car-shop,
stands near the railway station in the town of Harper's Ferry, with the
mountain wall not far behind it, and the Potomac River running below.
And from this building was fired the shot which pierced the heart of
slavery. And the Governor of Virginia captured this man, and took him