To set forth the political aspect of the Underground Railroad is not easy. Yet this side must be understood if the Underground Railroad is to appear in its true character as something more than a mere manifestation of the moral sentiment existing in the North and in some localities of the South. The romantic episodes in the fugitive slave controversy have been frequently described; but it has altogether escaped the eye of the general historian that the underground movement was one that grew from small beginnings into a great system; that it must be reckoned with as a distinct causal factor in tracing the growth of anti-slavery opinion; that it furnished object lessons in the horrors of slavery without cessation during two generations to communities in many parts of the free states; that it was largely serviceable in developing, if not in originating, the convictions of such powerful agents in the cause as Harriet Beecher Stowe and John Brown; that it alone serves to explain the enactment of that most remarkable piece of legislation, the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850; and, finally, that it furnished the ground for the charge brought again and again by the South against the North of injury wrought by the failure to execute the law, a charge that must be placed among the chief grievances of the slave states at the beginning of the Civil War. Even in colonial times there was difficulty in recovering fugitive slaves, because of the aid rendered them by friends, as is apparent from an examination of some of the regulations that the colonies began to pass soon after the introduction of slavery in 1619. The Director and Council of New Netherlands enacted an ordinance as early as 1640, one of the provisions of which forbade all inhabitants of New Netherlands to harbor or feed fugitive servants under a penalty of fifty guilders, "for the benefit of the Informer; 1/3 for the new Church and 1/3 for the Fiscal."[838] Other regulations for the same colony contained clauses prohibiting the entertainment of runaways; such are the laws of 1642,[839] 1648,[840] 1658,[841] and, after the Dutch had been supplanted by English control, those of 1702[842] and 1730.[843] An act of Virginia that went into force in 1642 was attributed to the complaints made at every quarter court "against divers persons who entertain and enter into covenants with runaway servants and freemen who have formerly hired themselves to others, to the great prejudice if not the utter undoing of divers poor men, thereby also encouraging servants to run from their masters and obscure themselves in some remote plantation." By way of penalty, to break up the practice of helping runaways, this law provided that persons guilty of the offence were to be fined twenty pounds of tobacco for each night's hospitality.[844] That the law was ineffectual is indicated by the increase of the penalty in 1655 by the addition to the twenty pounds of tobacco for each night's entertainment of forty