It exploded like a bombshell, for it was a terrific arraignment of the whole state. Her statements were denounced as untrue and slanderous, but a little investigation proved their truth, and with such men behind her as Channing, Horace Mann, and Samuel G. Howe, it was soon apparent that something would be done. The obstructions and delays of politicians were swept away before a steadily rising tide of public indignation, and a large appropriation was made by the legislature to provide proper quarters and proper treatment for insane persons. So Miss Dix won her first great victory, the forerunner of similar ones in almost every state in the union; for she travelled from state to state making the same investigations she had in Massachusetts, arousing public opinion, and compelling legislature after legislature to make adequate provision for the insane. The vastness of this campaign which Miss Dix planned deliberately and which she carried through until she had visited every state east of the Rocky Mountains, gives evidence to her extraordinary character. During the Civil War, she was superintendent of hospital nurses, having the entire control of their appointment and assignment. But the care of the insane was her life work. She resumed it at the close of the war, and carried it forward until her death. * * * * * We have already referred more than once, in the course of these chapters, to the anti-slavery agitation which ended in the Civil War. During the second quarter of the nineteenth century, it was the one great political question in America, upon which men were compelled to take one side or the other. From the first, there existed in the north a band of abolitionists--of men, in other words, who believed that the only solution of the slavery question was to put an end to that institution at once and forever. Of the persecutions which were visited on the abolitionists we have spoken when telling the story of Lucretia Mott. Social ostracism was the least of them.