what absolute history shall judge of these forms and phantoms of ours. John Brown began his life, his active life, in Kansas. The South planted that seed; it reaps the first fruit now.

to

Twelve years ago the great men in Washington, the Websters and the Clays, planted the Mexican War; and they reaped their appropriate fruit in General Taylor and General Pierce pushing them from their statesmen's stools. The South planted the seeds of violence in Kansas, and taught peaceful Northern men familiarity with bowie-knife and revolver. They planted nine hundred and ninety-nine seeds, and this is the first one that has flowered; this is the first drop of the coming shower. People do me the honor say, in some of the Western papers, that this is traceable to some teachings of mine. It is too much honor to such as I am. Gladly, if it were not fulsome vanity, would I clutch this laurel of having any share in the great resolute daring of that man who flung himself against an empire in behalf of justice and liberty. They were not the bravest men who fought at Saratoga and Yorktown in the war of 1776. Oh, no! It was rather those who flung themselves, at Lexington, few and feeble, against the embattled ranks of an empire, till then thought irresistible. Elderly men in powdered wigs and red velvet smoothed their ruffles, and cried: "Madmen!" Full-fed custom-house men said: "A pistol shot against Gibraltar!" But Captain Ingraham, under the Stars and Stripes, dictating terms to the fleet of the Cæsars, was only the echo of that Lexington gun. Harper's Ferry is the Lexington of to-day. Up to this moment Brown's life has been one unmixed success. Prudence, skill, courage, thrift, knowledge of his time, knowledge of his opponents, undaunted daring in the face

of the nation-he had all these. He was the man who could leave Kansas, and go into Missouri, and take eleven men and give them liberty, and bring them off on the horses which he carried with him-two of which he took as tribute from their masters, in order to facilitate escape. Then, when he had passed his human protégés from the vulture of the United States to the safe shelter of the English lion, this is the brave, frank, and sublime truster in God's right and absolute justice, that entered his name in the city of Cleveland, "John Brown, of Kansas," and advertised there two horses for sale, and stood in front of the auctioneer's stand, notifying all bidders of the defect in the title. But he added with nonchalance, when he told the story: "They brought a very excellent price." This is the man who, in the face of the nation, avowing his right, and endeavoring by what strength he had in behalf of the wronged, goes down to Harper's Ferry to follow up his work. say he failed. Every man has his Moscow. did fail-every man meets his Waterloo at last. There are two kinds of defeat. Whether in chains or in laurels, Liberty knows nothing but victories. Bunker Hill, soldiers call a defeat! But Liberty dates from it, though Warren lay dead on the field. Men say the attempt did not succeed. No man can command success. Whether it was well planned, and deserved to succeed, we shall be able to decide when Brown is free to tell us all he knows. Suppose he did fail, he has done a great deal still. Why, this is a decent country to live in now. Actually, in this Sodom of ours, seventeen men have been found ready to die for an idea. God be thanked for John Brown, that he has discovered or created them. I should feel some pride if I were in Europe now in confessing that I was an American. We have re

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deemed the long infamy of twenty years of subservience. But look back a bit. Is there anything new about this? Nothing at all. It is the natural result of anti-slavery teaching. For one, I accept it; I expected it. I cannot say that I prayed for it; I cannot say that I hoped for it; but at the same time no sane man has looked upon this matter for twenty years and supposed that we could go through this great moral convulsion, the great classes of society clashing and jostling against each other like frigates in a storm, and that there would not be such scenes as these. Why, in 1835 it was the other way. Then it was my bull that gored your ox. Their ideas came in conflict, and men of violence, and men who had not made up their minds to wait for the slow conversion of conscience, men who trusted in their own right hands, men who believed in bowie-knives-why, such sacked the city of Philadelphia, such made New York to be governed by a mob; Boston saw its mayor suppliant and kneeling to the chief of broadcloth in broad daylight. It was all on that side. The natural result, the first result of this starting of ideas, is like people who get half-awaked and use the first weapons that appear to them. The first developing and unfolding of national life were the mobs of 1835. People said it served us right; we had no right to the luxury of speaking our own minds; it was too expensive; these lavish, luxurious persons walking about here and actually saying what they think! Why, it was like speaking aloud in the midst of avalanches. To say "Liberty" in a loud tone, the Constitution of 1789 might come down-it would not do. But now things have changed. We have been talking thirty years. Twenty years we have talked everywhere, under all circumstances; we have been mobbed out of great cities

now.

and pelted out of little ones; we have been abused by great men and by little papers. What is the result? The tables have been turned; it is your bull that has gored my ox, And men that still believe in violence, the five points of whose faith are the fist, the bowie-knife, fire, poison, and the pistol, are ranged on the side of Liberty, and, unwilling to wait for the slow but sure steps of thought, lay on God's altar the best they have. You cannot expect to put a real Puritan Presbyterian, as John Brown is a regular Cromwellian dug up from two centuries ago-in the midst of our New England civilization, that dares not say its soul is its own, nor proclaim that it is wrong to sell a man at auction, and not have him show himself as he is. Put a hound in the presence of a deer, and he springs at his throat if he is a true bloodhound. Put a Christian in the presence of sin, and he will spring at its throat if he is a true Christian. And so into an acid we might throw white matter, but unless it is chalk it will not produce agitation. So if in a world of sinners you were to put American Christianity, it would be calm as oil; but put one Christian like John Brown, of Ossawatomie, and he makes the whole crystallize into right and wrong, and marshal themselves on one side or the other. And God makes him the text, and all he asks of our comparatively cowardly lips is to preach the sermon and to say to the American people that, whether that old man succeeded in a worldly sense or not, he stood a representative of law, of government, of right, of justice, of religion, and they were pirates that gathered around him and sought to wreak vengeance by taking his life. The banks of the Potomac are doubly dear now to history and to man! The dust of Washington rests there; and history will see forever on that riverside the brave old

man on his pallet, whose dust, when God calls him hence, the Father of his Country would be proud to make room for beside his own. But if Virginia tyrants dare hang him, after this mockery of a trial, it will take two more Washingtons at least to make the name of the State anything but abominable to the ages that come after. Well, I say what I really think. George Washington was a great man. Yes, I say what I really think. And I know, ladies and gentlemen, that, educated as you have been by the experience of the last ten years here, you would have thought me the silliest as well as the most cowardly man in the world if I should have come, with my twenty years behind me, and talked about anything else to-night except that great example which one man has set us on the banks of the Potomac. You expected, of course, that I should tell you my opinion of it.

I value this element that Brown has introduced into American politics for another reason. The South is a great power. There are no cowards in Virginia. It was not cowardice. Now, I try to speak very plainly, but you will misunderstand me. There is no cowardice in Virginia. The people of the South are not cowards. The lunatics in the Gospel were not cowards when they said: "Art thou come to torment us before the time?" They were brave enough, but they saw afar off. They saw the tremendous power that was entering into that charmed circle; they knew its inevitable victory. Virginia did not tremble at an old gray-headed man at Harper's Ferry; they trembled at a John Brown in every man's own conscience. He had been there many years, and, like that terrific scene which Beckford has drawn for us in his Hall of Eblis, where all ran round, each man with an incurable wound in his bosom, and agreed not to speak of it, so the South has been run§ 8-Orations-Vol. VIII.