It illustrated and emphasized as no previous event had done, the implacability of the sentiment hostile to slavery. It demonstrated, as the fact had never been demonstrated before, the hopelessly irrepressible character of the controversy concerning slavery. It alarmed and angered the South as it had never been alarmed and angered before. It indicated to the Southern people the fact that there were agencies active at the North which would stop at nothing that might help to the abolition of slavery; that even a servile war, with all the brutality and bloodthirstiness that servile war must mean to the South, was lightly contemplated by a certain and rapidly growing Northern opinion, as a legitimate means for the accomplishment of abolition. It indicated an implacability of sentiment against which there seemed to be no defense except in that dissolution of the Union which the extremists on both sides had so long and so freely invoked as a remedy for the hopeless division of the Republic into two antagonistic camps. John Brown's invasion would have counted for little if it had stood alone. But the rifles that he had in possession, with which to arm fugitive slaves, had been contributed by a citizen of Massachusetts under urgency of conspicuous representatives of the political party that sought the abolition of slavery. The five hundred dollars that Brown carried with him as a part of the equipment with which he hoped to create a servile war, was contributed by Boston citizens and represented a hostility as unkind as it was unlawful. The sanction given to John Brown's insane and treasonable raid by many newspapers and a certain part of the public at the North served to convince even the most moderate and conservative men at the South that there was no longer any hope or prospect of reconciliation between the two sections upon any basis of reasonable and mutual concession.