le way. It can't fairly be inferred from my past career.'
Ye need n't take so much pains, my friends, to wash your skirts of him.
No one will ever be convinced that he was any creature of yours. He
went and came, as he himself informs us, under the auspices of John
Brown, and nobody else.'

"'All is quiet in Harper's Ferry,' say the journals. What is the
character of that calm which follows when the law and the slaveholder
prevail? I regard this event as a touchstone designed to bring out
with glaring distinctness the character of this Government. We needed
to be thus assisted to see it by the light of history. It needed to
see itself. When a government puts forth its strength on the side of
injustice, as ours, to maintain slavery and kill the liberators of the
slave, it reveals itself simply as brute force. It is more manifest
than ever that tyranny rules. I see this Government to be effectually
allied with France and Austria in oppressing mankind.

"The only government that I recognize--and it matters not how few are
at the head of it, or how small its army,--is the power that
establishes justice in the land, never that which establishes
injustice. What shall we think of a government to which all the truly
brave and just men in the land are enemies, standing between it and
those whom it oppresses?

"Treason! Where does such treason take its rise? I cannot help
thinking of you as ye deserve, ye governments! Can you dry up the
fountain of thought? High treason, when it is resistance to tyranny
here below, has its origin in the power that makes and forever
re-creates man. When you have caught and hung all its human rebels,
you have accomplished nothing but your own guilt. You have not struck
at the fountain-head. The same indignation which cleared the temple
once will clear it again.

"I hear many condemn these men because they were so few. When were the
good and the brave ever in the majority? Would you have had him wait
till that time came? Till you and I came over to him? The very fact
that he had no rabble or troop of hirelings about him, would alone
distinguish him from ordinary heroes. His company was small, indeed,
because few could be found worthy to pass muster. Each one who there
laid down his life for the poor and oppressed was a picked man, called
out of many thousands, if not millions. A man of principle, of rare
courage and devoted humanity, ready to sacrifice his life at any mom