Next day came a curious episode. A classmate of mine, never distinguished for logical acuteness, came out in a leading daily paper with a violent attack upon me and my lecture. He lamented the fact that one who, as he said, had, while in college, shown much devotion to the anti- slavery cause, had now faced about, had no longer the courage of his opinions, and had not dared say a word against slavery in the United States. The article was laughable. It would have been easy to attack slavery and thus at once shut the minds and hearts of a large majority of the audience. But I felt then, as I have generally felt since, that the first and best thing to do is to SET PEOPLE AT THINKING, and to let them discover, or think that they discover, the truth for themselves. I made no reply, but an eminent clergyman of New Haven took up the cudgels in my favor, covered my opponent with ridicule, and did me the honor to declare that my lecture was one of the most effective anti-slavery arguments ever made in that city. With this, I retired from the field well satisfied. The lecture was asked for in various parts of the country, was delivered at various colleges and universities, and in many cities of western New York, Michigan, and Ohio; and finally, after the emancipation of the serfs, was re- cast and republished in the ``Atlantic Monthly'' under the title of ``The Rise and Decline of the Serf System in Russia.'' And now occurred a great change in my career which, as I fully believed, was to cut me off from all political life thoroughly and permanently. This was my election to the professorship of history and English literature in the University of Michigan. CHAPTER V THE CIVIL WAR PERIOD--1857-1864 Arriving at the University of Michigan in October, 1857, I threw myself into my new work most heartily. Though I felt deeply the importance of the questions then before the country, it seemed to me that the only way in which I could contribute anything to their solution was in aiding to train up a new race of young men who should understand our own time and its problems in the light of history. It was not difficult to point out many things in the past that had an important bearing upon the present, and my main work in this line was done in my lecture-room. I made no attempts to proselyte any of my hearers to either political party, my main aim being then, as it has been through my life, when dealing with students and the public at large, to set my audience or my readers at thinking, and to give them fruitful historical subjects to think upon. Among these subjects especially brought out in dealing with the middle ages, was the origin, growth, and decline of feudalism, and especially of the serf system, and of municipal liberties as connected with it. This, of course, had a general bearing upon the important problem we had to solve in the United States during the second half of that century.