"Mr. Stevens asks if Brown did not see the forces moving towards abolition more clearly than did his friends who protested against the daring of his schemes: yet he emphasizes too much, surely, the forlorn recklessness of the man's methods. But a more fearless, resolute, and cooler-headed man never lived. His family life, the devotion of his own flesh and blood to him, and his tenderness were indications of a character intensely human, but also of a man who had counted the cost and knew that the individual must yield to the race. He lit, not a candle, but a powder-magazine; and his last words prove that he foresaw, as plainly as man ever saw sunrise follow dawn, that blood, and blood alone, would loosen the shackles of the slave." Events, in fact, followed the track which Brown pointed out, and with a swiftness that startled even such as accepted his clear insight of the national situation. There was something prophetic in his perception of the future; he could not see well what was _directly_ before him, but of the consequences of his action, and of that of other men, he had the most piercing and sagacious view. Such men appear on earth but rarely; when they come, it is as martyrs and seers. Fatal are their perceptions, and to themselves as well as to the order of things they subvert. But it is more fatal to disregard the warning they give. Their remedy for existing ills, sharp as it must be, is for the healing of the nations and for the relief of man's estate. F. B. SANBORN. CONCORD, January, 1905. [Illustration] JOHN BROWN THE HERO Personal Reminiscences I A Call for Aid [Illustration] It was of an August morning in that eventful year of Kansas history, 1856, in the gray of the earliest dawn, that a horseman came riding at full speed up the creek, the south branch of the Pottawatomie, from the direction of the lower settlements, and halted before our cabin door. The animal he rode was all afoam, and gave other signs of having been urged hard and over a long distance. As the rider dismounted, his nervous and excited manner told us he was the bearer of ill tidings or that he was on some errand of unusual importance. "What news below?" was asked the stranger. "Bad news," he replied quickly. "The Ruffians are over the border upon us again, in strong force; and they are bent on 'cleaning us out' this time. If they keep on they won't leave a cornstalk standing to show where our crops grew." There is every reason to conclude that our informant was no other than James Montgomery, then all unknown to fame, but who was later to distinguish himself as a leader in the Kansas struggle for freedom.