But the romance in this portrait is due quite as much to the imagination of the artist as to the character of the subject. Emerson seems to have entirely overlooked in his estimate of Brown that he had no rational idea of the moral obligations of the citizen to the civil government and to the peace of society; and that his conscience in its apparent simplicity was really in dire confusion. The sentence he quotes from Brown's conversation has its practical commentary in Brown's acts. He was as ready to take the sword, to redress what he considered a breach of the Golden Rule or the Declaration of Independence, as if mankind had not for thousands of years and with infinite cost been building up institutions for the peaceful settlement of difficulties. In Kansas he saw in the political struggle simply an issue to be tried out by force between good men and bad men; and he made himself executioner of a group of men he considered bad, thereby plunging into a series of murders utterly repugnant to his natural humanity. He afterward justified the deed, without avowing his own part in it, which was not fully known till twenty years later. After Harper's Ferry, the _Springfield Republican_ (which judged him very favorably), speaking partly from personal knowledge gained during his residence in Springfield, said: "He is so constituted that when he gets possessed of an idea he carries it out with unflinching fidelity to all its logical consequences, as they seem to him, hesitating at no absurdity and deterred by no unpleasant consequences to himself personally. He is a Presbyterian in his faith, and feels that it is for this very purpose that God has reared him up." When a man is so possessed by the conviction that he is God's instrument as to set himself outside of ordinary human morality, he is presumably on the verge of shipwreck. The _Republican_, while emphasizing the popular estimate of John Brown as "a hero," coupled with this the characterization of him as "a misguided and insane man." The project he was now pressing--the establishment of a mountain refuge for fugitive slaves, working toward the depreciation of slave property, and the ultimate extinction of the system--had a certain superficial plausibility; and it seemed to avoid the inhumanity of general insurrection. But it was at the best hardly more than a boy's romance, and at the last moment Brown abandoned it for a still more impracticable plan.