His words, just quoted, are the words of a prophet; and yet he was destined, in practical politics, to become an adherent of half-measures, and a make-weight for self-seekers. It was as the result of one of the fugitive slave cases and in the year 1846 that Dr. Howe became immersed in the anti-slavery cause. He helped to edit the “Commonwealth,” the organ of the Conscience Whigs: he ran for office, and he became the head of a vigilance committee, whose activity continued down to the outbreak of the war. Now, as everyone knows, vigilance committees are called into being in cases when law has broken down. The object of such committees is to do things which are necessary, but illegal; hence their doings are secret. It was one of the strange features of the life of that period that the most beautiful natures of the age, the most tender, the most unselfish, the most romantic, felt called upon to do violent, lawless and bloody work. To threaten bad men with condign punishment, to organize the rescue of prisoners, to condone theft, perjury and manslaughter when committed by their own partisans--such were the duties of a vigilance committee. The beginning of this vigilance work was the underground railroad which existed all over the North, and even to some extent in the border slave states. To help fugitive slaves on their way to freedom became a passionate occupation of young and old, however, only after Garrison’s doctrines had given a religious sanction to the practice. Social conditions in America, at this time, led to a confusion of moral ideas and sometimes to a perversion of the moral sense. We are familiar with the perplexities that distressed tender-hearted people in the border free states. In the border slave states moral questions were equally complex. There is a page or two in Huckleberry Finn in which Mark Twain has depicted the feelings of a boy, living in the border slave state Missouri, as to the ethics of helping a runaway slave to escape. Surely the passage is among the greatest pages which that great author ever penned.... I says; “All right; but wait a minute. There’s one more thing--a thing that nobody don’t know but me. And that is, there’s a nigger here that I’m trying to steal out of slavery, and his name is Jim--old Miss Watson’s Jim.” He says: “What! Why Jim is--” He stopped and went to studying. I says: “I know what you’ll say. You’ll say its dirty, low-down business; but what if it is? _I’m_ low down; and I’m going to steal him and I want you to keep mum and not let on. Will you?” His eye lit up, and he says: “I’ll _help_ you steal him!” Well, I let go all holts then, like I was shot. It was the most astonishing speech I ever heard--and I’m bound to say Tom Sawyer fell considerable in my estimation. Only I couldn’t believe it. Tom Sawyer a _nigger stealer_!...