It is not because of any one thing that he has done or said that Howe is important. It is because he was by nature endowed with an unconscious, spontaneous vision of truth in regard to the defective classes. When dealing with them, he sees society as a whole and these classes as parts of it. He saw that the whole of society must be used in order to work out this problem. The state and the individual, the influence of Christ and the value of money; in fact all social factors are, in Howe’s mind, viewed as elements in that solid mesh and transparent unity of suffering force--humanity. When he deals with an institution, or a theory of criminal reform, he deals with it as an agent of the invisible. It is to him no more than a device or a symbol. Now, when we remember that he was, above all things, a practical man, a man of means to ends, a man of experience and of the counting house, we are prepared to realize the magnitude of his intellect. It was, however, only when Howe was thinking and scheming over the fate of the dependent classes that his mind worked in this transcendent way. In other matters he was an ordinary man, a man of headaches and irritability, a man of doubts and errors. I know of nothing that so marks the inscrutability of human nature as does the history of Dr. Howe’s relation to the slavery question. That question had been in active eruption ever since 1830. Dr. Howe, one of the most sensitive philanthropists known to history, lived in daily contact with the question for many years before he became effectively interested. Here was a dependent class indeed--the slaves: here was a question of human suffering compared to which the sorrows of his deaf-mutes and half idiots were trifling accidents, the inevitable percentage of pain that fringes all civilization. Compared to the horrors of slavery the evils which excited Dr. Howe’s compassion were imperceptible. Hardly ever have more telling exhibitions been unrolled before benevolent people than those which were within the daily repertory of the abolitionists, after Garrison had begun his work. Nevertheless, for Dr. Howe the hour had not yet struck. At last he became drawn into the slavery question and, in fact, almost killed himself over it. There remains a great difference, however, between his slavery work and his other work. When it comes to slavery, Dr. Howe’s devotion is the same, his labors are the same; but his genius is not the same. It was not given to any man to understand the slavery question in the way that Howe understood the cause of the blind or the idiotic. Indeed, slavery was not a question, but a condition, an atmosphere, a thing so close and clinging, so inherent and ingrown that, like the shirt of Nessus, it brought the flesh with it when it was removed. Poor or great, sinner or saint, every man stood on an equality before the moral problems of slavery, and underwent either conversion or corruption when the wave smote him.