Its sudden and amazing success was not confined to this country. The story ran in three Paris newspapers at once, was promptly dramatized, and has held the stage in France ever since. It was placed upon the Index in Italy, as being subversive of established authority. Millions of copies were sold in Europe, and Uncle Tom's Cabin, more than any other cause, held the English working men in sympathy with the North in the English cotton crisis of our Civil War. It is easy to see the faults of this masterpiece and impossible not to recognize its excellencies. "If our art has not scope enough to include a book of this kind," said Madame George Sand, "we had better stretch the terms of our art a little." For the book proved to be, as its author had hoped, a "living dramatic reality." Topsy, Chloe, Sam and Andy, Miss Ophelia and Legree are alive. Mrs. St. Clare might have been one of Balzac's indolent, sensuous women. Uncle Tom himself is a bit too good to be true, and readers no longer weep over the death of little Eva--nor, for that matter, over the death of Dickens's little Nell. There is some melodrama, some religiosity, and there are some absurd recognition scenes at the close. Nevertheless with an instinctive genius which Zola would have envied, Mrs. Stowe embodies in men and women the vast and ominous system of slavery. All the tragic forces of necessity, blindness, sacrifice, and retribution are here: neither Shelby, nor Eliza, nor the tall Kentuckian who aids her, nor John Bird, nor Uncle Tom himself in the final act of his drama, can help himself. For good or evil they are the products and results of the system; and yet they have and they give the illusion of volition. Mrs. Stowe lived to write many another novel and short story, among them Dred, The Minister's Wooing, Oldtown Folks, Oldtown Fireside Stories. In the local short story she deserves the honors due to one of the pioneers, and her keen affectionate observation, her humor, and her humanity, would have given her a literary reputation quite independent of her masterpiece. But she is likely to pay the penalty of that astounding success, and to go down to posterity as the author of a single book. She would not mind this fate.