and say what they mean. They are simply at their old tricks still.

  "It was always conceded to him," says one who calls him crazy,
"that he was a conscientious man, very modest in his demeanor,
apparently inoffensive, until the subject of Slavery was introduced,
when he would exhibit a feeling of indignation unparalleled."

  The slave-ship is on her way, crowded with its dying victims; new
cargoes are being added in mid-ocean; a small crew of slaveholders,
countenanced by a large body of passengers, is smothering four
millions under the hatches, and yet the politician asserts that the
only proper way by which deliverance is to be obtained is by "the
quiet diffusion of the sentiments of humanity," without any
"outbreak." As if the sentiments of humanity were ever found
unaccompanied by its deeds, and you could disperse them, all
finished to order, the pure article, as easily as water with a
watering-pot, and so lay the dust. What is that that I hear cast
overboard? The bodies of the dead that have found deliverance. That is
the way we are "diffusing" humanity, and its sentiments with it.

  Prominent and influential editors, accustomed to deal with
politicians, men of an infinitely lower grade, say, in their
ignorance, that he acted "on the principle of revenge." They do not
know the man. They must enlarge themselves to conceive of him. I
have no doubt that the time will come when they will begin to see
him as he was. They have got to conceive of a man of faith and of
religious principle, and not a politician or an Indian; of a man who
did not wait till he was personally interfered with or thwarted in
some harmless business before he gave his life to the cause of the
oppressed.

  If Walker may be considered the representative of the South, I
wish I could say that Brown was the representative of the North. He
was a superior man. He did not value his bodily life in comparison
with ideal things. He did not recognize unjust human laws, but
resisted them as he was bid. For once we are lifted out of the
trivialness and dust of politics into the region of truth and manhood.
No man in America has ever stood up so persistently and effectively
for the dignity of human nature, knowing himself for a man, and the
equal of any and all governments. In that sense he was the most
American of us all. He needed no babbling lawyer, making false issues,
to defend him. He was more than a match for all the judges that
American voters, or office-holders of whatever grade, can create. He
could not have been tried by a jury of his peers, because his peers
did not exist. When a man stands up serenely against the
condemnation and vengeance of mankind, rising above them literally
by a whole body- even though he were of late the vilest murderer,
who has settled that matter with himself- the spectacle is a sublime
one- didn't ye know it, ye Liberators, ye Tribunes, ye Republicans?-
and we become criminal in comparison. Do yourselves the honor to
recognize him. He needs none of your respect.

  As for the Democratic journals, they are not human enough to
affect me at all. I do not feel indignation at anything they may say.

  I am aware that I anticipate a little- that he was still, at the
last accounts, alive in the hands of his foes; but that being the
case, I have all along found myself thinking and speaking of him as
physically dead.

  I do not believe in erecting statues to those who still live in
our hearts, whose bones have not yet crumbled in the earth around
us, but I would rather see the statue of Captain Brown in the
Massachusetts State-House yard than that of any other man whom I know.
I rejoice that I live in this age, that I am his contemporary.

  What a contrast, when we turn to that political party which is so
anxiously shuffling him and his plot out of its way, and looking
around for some available slaveholder, perhaps, to be its candidate,
at least for one who will execute the Fugitive Slave Law, and all
those other unjust laws which he took up arms to annul!

  Insane! A father and six sons, and one son-in-law, and several
more men besides- as many at least as twelve disciples- all struck
with insanity at once; while the same tyrant holds with a firmer gripe
than ever his four millions of slaves, and a thousand sane editors,
his abettors, are saving their country and their bacon! just as insane
were his efforts in Kansas. Ask the tyrant who is his most dangerous
foe, the sane man or the insane? Do the thousands who know him best,
who have rejoiced at his deeds in Kansas, and have afforded him
material aid there, think him insane? Such a use of this word is a
mere trope with most who persist in using it, and I have no doubt that
many of the rest have already in silence retracted their words.

  Read his admirable answers to Mason and others. How they are dwarfed
and defeated by the contrast! On the one side, half-brutish,
half-timid questioning; on the other, truth, clear as lightning,
crashing into their obscene temples. They are made to stand with
Pilate, and Gessler, and the Inquisition. How ineffectual their speech
and action! and what a void their silence! They are but helpless tools
in this great work. It was no human power that gathered them about
this preacher.

  What have Massachusetts and the North sent a few sane
representatives to Congress for, of late years?- to declare with
effect what kind of sentiments? All their speeches put together and
boiled down- and probably they themselves will confess it- do not
match for manly directness and force, and for simple truth, the few
casual remarks of crazy John Brown on the floor of the Harper's
Ferry engine-house- that man whom you are about to hang, to send to