It is only just to state that, according to recently published narratives of these slave importations, with details that could not have been related at the time with safety for the parties concerned, the Federal authorities in the South seem to have made a sincere effort to bring the slave-traders to justice, and the planters apparently did not welcome the traffic. The pioneers of the great struggle to come met on the plains of Kansas and several years of fierce border strife ended in victory for freedom. John Brown, whom the world calls a fanatic, perished on the scaffold at Harper's Ferry in a vain attempt to liberate the slaves, and while editors vacillated and quibbled, and fawning time servers applauded, Thoreau, from his hermitage in the New England woods, paid eloquent tribute to the man who dared to die for the truth. Away in the West a figure was looming up, a gaunt, homely figure, born in and nurtured in hardship, but endowed as no other man of his age was endowed, with the ability to guide his country through the awful ordeal to come. He perceived the right, and he boldly declared it. "If it is decreed that I should go down because of this speech, then let me go down linked to the truth--let me die in the advocacy of what is just and right," said Abraham Lincoln to the friends who disapproved his celebrated declaration that the government could not endure half slave, half free. "In the right to eat the bread without the leave of anybody else, which his own hand earns, he (the negro) is my equal, and the equal of Judge Douglas, and the equal of every living man"--was another sterling utterance which struck home to the North.