During those heated days of 1850, when the men of light and leading began to see their way clearly, the masses were still timid, hesitant and vacillating in their judgments on slavery. Scholars and thinking men had already been reached by poets, authors and editors, while the preachers and lecturers had driven their message home to the conviction of the ruling classes. Later on was to come the revival of 1857 that should stir the conscience, but preparatory to that movement it was necessary to inform the intellect and rouse the affections of the millions. Then it was that God raised up an author to touch the heart of the people. Wonderful the power of the novel in social reform! The novels of "Oliver Twist," and "Dombey and Son," were what roused the English people to a realization of the woes and wrongs of chimney sweeps, of children in the factories and mines of Great Britain. It was a novel, "All Sorts and Conditions of Men," that later built People's Palace in the Whitechapel district of London. And it was a novel, named "Uncle Tom's Cabin," that created the atmosphere of sympathy in which the flowers of self-sacrifice and heroism unfolded. The authoress was the daughter of Lyman Beecher, who had seven sons and four daughters, each one of whom was either a preacher or reformer in some field. His daughter, Harriet, married Prof. Calvin E. Stowe, of Lane Seminary in Cincinnati, where, on the border between the free soil of Ohio and the slave soil of Kentucky, people were in a state of constant excitement and upheaval. The old Blue Grass State exhibited slavery in its very best condition and also in its worst form. The harrowing tales and incidents that were afterwards worked up into literary form by the gifted authoress were all matters of observation, conversation and experience. One of the earliest incidents of the Stowes' life in Cincinnati was an experience of Professor Stowe with one of the Beecher boys. While travelling in Kentucky, the two young men witnessed the flight of a negro woman, who was running away with her little child, whom they helped across the Ohio River, to be sent on by the Underground Railway to Oberlin, on the shore of Lake Erie. And the similar incident, Eliza's flight across the ice, her son Charles[1] writes in his recent story of her life, "was an actual occurrence. She had known and had often talked with the very man who helped Eliza up the bank of the river." Later during their Cincinnati residence, Mrs. Stowe conducted a small private school and made a practice of allowing a few coloured children to attend it. One evening the mother of one of these coloured children came to the Stowes' house in a frenzy of terror, saying that her little girl had been seized and carried to the river, to be sold as a slave in Kentucky. Mrs. Stowe raised the money to ransom the beautiful child.