This was bad enough; but worse yet, since the attempt had miserably failed, was the fact that the North saw none of these things. It did not, seemingly could not, understand. Where the woman of the South saw in John Brown only the brutal assailer of all that womanhood held most precious, she of the North,--who could she have realized the peril in which her Southern sister stood, would have stirred the North with her cry,--saw in him only the martyr to the cause of freedom, the man who gave his life in the attempt to bring from bondage an oppressed and ill-treated race; and so completely had prejudice and fanaticism clouded the conscience that when Wendell Phillips made of this man a certain blasphemous comparison she was not shocked, but, carried away by her enthusiasm, hailed the words as true and deserved. This does not apply to all the daughters of the North; there were some who saw clearly and were not blinded by the simoom of fanaticism which swept over that section; but there was a minority which dared not lift its voice against the clamor of the masses. The most fatal of all causes of strife had fallen upon the North: it did not understand. But this in turn the Southern woman could not comprehend. She could not see that the peril to her honor, so plain to her, was beyond the scope of Northern vision. Therefore she in her wrath accused her sisters of the North of carelessness of her honor in their enthusiasm for the cause of a race which would put that honor in peril; she held them indifferent to the preservation of the crown of her womanhood, so that a few blacks might be given a freedom which they would turn to the worst account. She laid it all to sectional hatred, to the cherished anger of the Puritan against the Cavalier; she was intolerant--and who can blame her, seeing as she did?--of the canonization of John Brown, which was chiefly the work of her Northern sisters, to whose enthusiasm that of the men, even of such fanatics as Phillips, was as nothing. So, begun and fostered in mutual misunderstanding, grew the breach between the sections; and of all the hands that digged the grave of Peace, the most eager and rapid were those of the women of our land.