It is now necessary to turn again to the subject of the war between the sections. Darker and darker grew the threatening cloud, until it was rent by a bolt which fell with fatal effect and set the whole land in a blaze. This was the famous insurrection of John Brown, which knew its inception and inglorious end at Harper's Ferry. It is not easy for us at this time to appreciate the aspects of "John Brown's raid," as it presented itself to the North and the South, and the aspect which it especially bore to the women of the latter section has never been given its full importance at the hands of chroniclers. Brown's acknowledged and boasted purpose to set free the slaves and arm them against their masters in insurrection was looked upon by every Southern woman as a direct threat--of which the carrying out was averted only by the hand of an over-ruling Providence--against that which her womanhood most prized. She knew what would have been the effect of the loosing upon the community of a horde of semi-savages, mad with the lust of blood and rapine, drunk with the liberty which they would look upon as unbridled license; for such, as she well knew, would the majority of the slaves become under conditions which would appeal to their worst side and would in their novelty lead to all excess. The narrow view which sees in the burning anger of the South toward this attempt only dread of loss of property is utterly false; it was the personal aspect of the matter which appealed to every Southern woman, and, because of this, to every Southern man. Even the partial success of such an attempt would have meant ruined and dishonored homes throughout the Southern land; the honor of its women, that most precious of all possessions, was in peril in such enterprise, and it was the threat against this that set the Southland aflame with rage against the would-be perpetrators of such an atrocity. It was not the menace to property or even to life; it was "the unutterable shame That turns the coward's heart to steel, the sluggard's blood to flame." For the South knew the negro, his bad qualities as well as his good; and, while the women of the South knew that their elder house-servants would protect them with their lives, if necessary, they also knew that the horde of fieldhands, intoxicated by a liberty whose nature they could not understand, would turn at once to the gratification of the savage nature which slept chained within them and would make of the land an offense to heaven.