It seemed not merely that they _could_ not understand the thing; they _would_ not. The truth did not please them, and the best and wisest of them appeared to have the idea that they had only not to see it, and it would cease to be the truth; after the manner of the learned men of Galileo’s time, who declined to look through his telescope, or to watch him drop weights from the Tower of Pisa. They made it a matter of offence that anyone should understand; the ability to predict political events was held to imply some collusion with them. When Lincoln, just before the crash, ventured to doubt the stability of “a house divided against itself,” his enemies fell upon him precisely as if he had declared, not that such a house would fall, but that he intended to knock it down. And this was the established view of all the conservatism of the country, only two or three years before there burst upon it one of the most fearful cataclysms of history. Let us endeavour to place ourselves in the position of the average man of 1860, and see now the whole matter appeared to him. Way back in the early thirties, eight or ten more or less insane fanatics—“apostate priests and unsexed women,” as one writer described them—had got together and begun an agitation for a wholly impossible and visionary (to say nothing of revolutionary and unconstitutional) programme—“the immediate and unconditional emancipation of the slaves.” They formed a society and started a paper called the _Liberator_. When governors of Southern states protested concerning it, the Hon. Harrison Gray Otis, Mayor of Boston, wrote as follows: “It appeared upon inquiry that no member of the city government, nor any person of my acquaintance, had ever heard of the publication. Sometime afterward it was reported to me by the city officers that they had ferreted out the paper and its editor; that his office was an obscure hole, his only visible auxiliary a negro boy, and his supporters a very few ignorant persons of all colours. This information, with the consent of the Aldermen, I communicated to the above named governors, with an utterance of my belief that the new fanaticism had not made, nor was likely to make, proselytes among the respectable classes of the people.”