What think ye of John Brown? Have the widely separated opinions of twenty-five years ago approached or are they even more divergent? Of course, the active thinkers and workers of that day have joined the great majority. A younger and later generation has the conduct of affairs. In the main, those who hated him then hate him now. Those who thought him a martyr then are sure of it now. Perhaps we are still too near the events that made him famous to properly weigh and criticise the evidence; but what we write now, with what has been written, must be the source of future conclusions. As to the South, it is far too early to expect other than the most rancorous feeling towards him. More than many of us are willing to admit, we are the creatures of our surroundings, men, thinking and acting as we have been reared. John Brown put himself in direct opposition to all that made the South distinctive; and, however much I may blame the section for its continued hold on Slavery, I cannot think it strange that the inhabitants looked upon the Liberator with feelings quite the reverse from ours. For those, however, of equal privileges with ourselves, of substantially the same rearing, I have not the same measure of charity. In 1880 one G.W. Brown, M.D., of Rockford, Illinois, formerly the editor of a paper in Kansas, gave himself the trouble to write a pamphlet in which he spares no effort to calumniate the Old Hero. I quote a notice of it from the _Boston Journal_: "The writer, Dr. G.W. Brown, in slip-shod and often ungrammatical English assails the memory of Old John Brown, charges him with active participation in various bloody crimes, and abuses his biographers and eulogists. Dr. Brown writes as an eye-witness of many of the things which he describes; but of his credibility we have no means of judging save so far as the bitterness of his tone casts suspicion on his veracity." Happily we are able to tell just what Brown himself thought of his detractor, and of the paper that he conducted; for in July, 1858, writing to F.G. Sanborn, he says: "I believe all honest, sensible Free State men in Kansas consider George Washington Brown's _Herald of Freedom_ one of the most mischievous, traitorous publications in the whole country." "A murderous fanatic and midnight assassin" is what the _Louisville Journal_ calls him. Just what the same paper calls Mr. Phillip Thompson, Member of Congress from Kentucky, I cannot state; but from the generally warped nature of its judgment I am not disposed to set much store by its opinion of him of Harper's Ferry.