Increased excitement followed. A local politician, afterward a member of Congress, became the leader in a bitter and disgraceful prosecution of the brave woman, and, when they found it impossible to drive her from her position by ordinary measures, secured the passage of a law making it a crime to open a school for colored children without the consent of the selectmen of the town. The power of the State of Connecticut was thus invoked, and used for the crushing of one brave little Quakeress. Miss Crandall was arrested, and imprisoned in a cell from which a murderer had just gone to the gallows. Her case was tried in August, 1833. One jury failed to agree. Another found her guilty. The case was appealed, and proceedings quashed on the ground of an informality, the higher court thus evading the question raised as to the constitutionality of the law. An attempt to burn Miss Crandall's house followed, and on the night of Sept. 9, 1834, it was made untenantable under the assaults of a mob. The subject of this bitter and relentless persecution, Mrs. Prudence (Crandall) Philleo, is still living, and tardy justice comes forward to recognize the wrong of a half century ago. The children of her persecutors unite with others in a petition to the lawmaking power which was induced to brand her as a criminal, to atone for past wrongs by present relief. It is safe to say that the Canterbury of to-day would gladly blot from history this story of the Canterbury of a half century ago. It is equally safe to say that the Quitman of fifty years to come (and much sooner) will gladly bury in oblivion the story of the burning school-house and frightened and helpless females and children, which the Quitman of to-day has put upon the page of current history. There is a very patent moral to this "Canterbury tale." It reads about as follows: Twenty-five years after the Canterbury persecution, its repetition would have been an impossibility. Twenty-five years after the Quitman persecution--or any other acts, in any southern state, of like character--what? Let us, who are only fifty years away from similar deeds at our own doors, go our way, doing the works of charity, humanity, patriotism, and wait and see. For present wrongs atonement comes in bitter tears, By children shed for deeds of sires in other years; Brute passion rules but for a day, then hides its head, And justice, born of love and mercy, rules instead. * * * * * Archdeacon Farrar, in a recent article in the _North American Review_, pays a tribute to the virtues of the founders of New England which has been rarely excelled in fervor of rhetoric and laudatory statement by the most gifted of after-dinner orators among the sons of Puritans and Pilgrims.