When was it that John Brown, practical shepherd, tanner, farmer, surveyor, cattle expert, real-estate speculator and wool merchant, first conceived what he calls in his autobiography "his greatest or principal object" in life--the forcible overthrow of slavery in his native land? The question is not an idle one, etc.[501] The question, nevertheless, is an idle one. During the interview which Brown gave out at Harper's Ferry, October 18th, Mr. Vallandigham asked him this pointed question: "How long have you been engaged in this business?"[502] To which Brown replied: From the breaking out of the difficulties in Kansas. Four of my sons had gone there to settle and they wanted me to go.[503] Also, Brown stated over his signature, in March, 1859, that it was "since 1855" that it had been his judgment that the way to successfully oppose slavery "would be to meddle directly with the peculiar institution."[504] That he had the subject under consideration prior to 1845 is expressly discredited by Brown, in his autobiography, in the statement that he was "averse to military affairs"; that he refused to "train _or drill_; but paid fines & got along like a Quaker until his age finally cleared him of military duty."[505] The record of Brown's life, prior to 1857, is barren of any contemporaneous expression by him or by any member of his family which even remotely suggests the possibility that he might have contemplated attempting a forcible _assault_ against slavery. If his mind had been preoccupied with a desire of such overshadowing importance the fact would have shone in the letters which he wrote to his children January 23, and August 6, 1852, relating to the conduct of their lives.[506] There is much, however, in this history which discredits the assumption that he gave the subject any consideration whatever. A man whose life was a "burning" devotion to an ambition so heroic as to become the "David of the Goliath of Slavery,"[507] ought to have shown some personal interest in the matter; he should not have left it wholly to his panegyrists. It appears however that the peaceful "tanner and shepherd" was so unconscious of having any object in life worth living for that he "felt," during this time, "a strong and steady desire to die";[508] a condition of mind wholly inconsistent with heroism or with one "burning" to bear arms, or with a "man of war emerging from the chrysalis of peace."[509] The assumptions upon which Mr. Villard relies for the relevancy of his question are gratuitous. The chapter is a scholarly example, put forth by a scholar, of the art of making "much ado about nothing."