Only those who lived in that time can know the feeling which filled the hearts of those who beheld in John Brown the agent of the divine purpose of destroying slavery. Men are no longer so sure of God's hand in their affairs as they once were, but I think we are surer that He does not authorize evil that good may come, and that we can well believe the murders which Brown did as an act of war in Kansas had not His sanction. In the mad skurry which followed the incident of Harper's Ferry in 1859 some things were easily shuffled out of sight. Probably very few of those who applauded or palliated Brown's attempt knew that he had taken men from their wives and children and made his partisans chop them down that their death might strike terror into the pro-slavery invaders, while he forbore from some strange policy to slaughter them with his own hand. His record was not searched to this dreadful fact in my knowledge, either by the Democrats who tried to inculpate the Republicans for his invasion of Virginia or by the Republicans who more or less disowned him. What his best friends could say and what most of them believed, was that he had been maddened by the murder of his sons in Kansas, and that his wild attempt was traceable to the wrongs he had suffered. His own dignity as he lay wounded and captive in the engine-house at Harper's Ferry, where the volunteer counsel for the prosecution flocked upon him from every quarter, and questioned him and cross-questioned him, did the rest, and a sort of cult grew up which venerated him before his death. I myself was of that cult, as certain fervent verses would testify if I here refused to do so. They were not such very bad verses, as verses, though they were technically faulty in places, but in the light which Mr. Oswald Villard's history of John Brown has finally cast upon that lurid passage of his life I perceive that they were mistaken. He was not bloodier than most heroes, but he was not a martyr, except as he was willing to sacrifice himself along with others for a holy cause, and he was a saint only of the Old Testament sort of Samuel who hewed Agag in pieces before the Lord. But from first to last he was of the inevitable, and the Virginians could no more have saved themselves from putting him to death than he could have saved himself from venturing his life to free their slaves. Out of that business it seems to me now that they came with greater honor than their Northern friends and allies. The South has enough wrongs against the negroes to answer for in the past and in the present, but we cannot lay wholly to its charge the fate of the slave's champion; he was of the make of its own sons in his appeal to violence, and apparently the South understood him better than the North. There was then no evil too great for us to think or say of the Virginians, and yet after they could free him from the politicians, mainly Northern, who infested him in the first