... I want you to undertake to provide a substitute for an address you saw last season, directed to the officers and soldiers of the United States Army. The ideas contained in that address I, of course, like for I furnished the skeleton. I never had the ability to clothe those ideas in language at all, to satisfy myself.... In the first place it must be short or it will not be generally read. It must be in the simplest or plainest language, without the least affectation of the scholar about it, and yet be worded with great clearness and power.... The address should be appropriate, and particularly adapted to the peculiar circumstances we anticipate, and should look to the actual change of service from that of Satan to the service of God. It should be in short, a most earnest and powerful appeal to men's sense of right and to their feelings of humanity. Soldiers are men, and no man can certainly calculate the value and importance of getting a single "nail into old Captain Kidd's chest." It should be provided beforehand, and be ready in advance to distribute by all persons, male and female, who may be disposed to favor the right.... Now, my dear sir, I have told you about as well as I know how, what I am anxious at once to secure. Will you write the tracts, or get them written, so that I may commence colporteur?[278] There can be no doubt that Brown placed a high estimate upon the value of this tract, but we know from the postscript thereto, that, although the tract was dedicated to the "Officers and Soldiers" of the army, it was the "common soldier" that he hoped to arouse and incite. His effort to convert the army to his service, by means of a tract, may be called madness, but it may also be said there was "method" in the madness. If he had been criticised in relation to this matter, he would probably have said in reply what he said to Mr. Sanborn, defending his action in ordering the thousand spears: "Wise men may ridicule the idea; but I take the whole responsibility of that job;" which was equivalent to saying: "You do not comprehend the scope of my scheme, or the use which I intend to make of these spears. When they have accomplished their silent but deadly work, the wisdom of my conduct concerning them will appear." The trouble in this case was how to obtain an opportunity to inject the virus of revolt into the ranks of the army--how to start the contagion--how to get his proposition before the troops, and to explain what he intended to do; and what he would have at his disposal to offer in the way of rewards for services in his army, without putting himself and his plans in peril. How he intended to use the tract can only be surmised. But the fact remains that he had to begin this all important move somehow or somewhere, and the tract was, probably, evolved from his