"Carlyle says that when any great change in human society is to be wrought God raises up men to whom that change is made to appear as the one thing needful and absolutely indispensable. Scholars, orators, poets, philanthropists, play their parts, but the crisis comes at last through some one who is stigmatized as a fanatic by his contemporaries, and whom the supporters of the systems he assails crucify between theives or gibbet as a felon. The man who is not afraid to die for an idea is the most potential and convincing advocate. "Already the great intellectual leaders of the movement for the abolition of slavery are dead. The student of the future will exhume their orations, arguments and state papers, as a part of the subterranean history of the epoch. The antiquarian will dig up their remains from the alluvial drift of the period, and construe their relations to the great events in which they were actors. But the three men of this era who will loom forever against the remotest horizon of time, as the pyramids against the voiceless desert, or mountain peaks over the subordinate plains, are Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses S. Grant and old John Brown of Ossowattamie." Senator Ingalls well knew that Brown had no such intellectual massiveness, or splendid culture, as had Webster, Clay, Jefferson, Sumner, and many other eminent Americans. He referred to the majesty of personal achievements. From this standpoint men like Garabaldi, Morse, Harriman, Edison, Roosevelt and Cook, the Arctic explorer have been great. Brown's life was a perpetual sacrifice for the annihilation of American slavery. Very defective as a military leader he was always ready to do, dare and die to assist in this work. Even today tens of thousands of educated men regard him as a monomaniac concerning the abolition of slavery. For many years, in the state of Kansas, he had permitted his own life, and the life of each of his sons, to be in continual peril that they might assist in placing Kansas in the constellation of free States. Men like Gerrit Smith and John L. Stearns financed his schemes from their wealth. Men like Henry Ward Beecher, Ralph Waldo Emerson, George B. Cheever, William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips and Theodore Parker, delivered eulogies on Brown after he had been hung. They most eloquently denounced slavery from pulpits and platforms; but they lived in the limelight of oratorical popularity and flourished amidst luxurious ease. To Brown's immortal credit be it said that he gave domestic security, his humble fortune, his perillous work, the lives of his cherished sons and his own blood and life for the anti-slavery opinions that were anchored in his soul. His prison letters to many friends are full of intrepidity, submission to the divine providence and heroic anticipations of immortal blessedness. Ten minutes before he left his jail cell for the gallows he handed to a prison official a sheet of paper on which he had written these words: "I, John