One morning in August, 1863, a young clergyman was called out of bed in a hotel at Lawrence, Kansas.  The man who called him was one of Quantrell’s guerrillas, and he wanted him to hurry downstairs, and be shot.  All over the border town that morning people were being murdered.  A band of raiders had ridden in early to perpetrate the Lawrence massacre.

The guerrilla who called the clergyman was impatient.  The latter, when fully awake, was horrified by what he saw going on through his window.  As he came downstairs the guerrilla demanded his watch and money, and then wanted to know if he was an abolitionist.  The clergyman was trembling.  But he decided that if he was to die then and there, it would not be with a lie on his lips.  So he said, yes, he was, and followed up the admission with a remark that immediately turned the whole affair into another channel.

He and the guerrilla sat down on the porch, while people were being killed through the town, and had a long talk.  It lasted until the raiders were ready to leave.  When the clergyman’s guerrilla mounted to join his confederates he was strictly on the defensive.  He handed back the New Englander’s valuables and apologized for disturbing him, and asked to be thought well of.

That clergyman lived many years after the Lawrence massacre.  What did he say to the guerrilla?  What was there in his personality that led the latter to sit down and talk?  What did they talk about?

‘Are you a Yankee abolitionist?’ the guerrilla had asked.

‘Yes—­I am,’ was the reply, ’and you know very well that you ought to be ashamed of what you’re doing.’

This drew the matter directly to a moral issue.  It brought the guerrilla up roundly.  The clergyman was only a stripling beside this seasoned border ruffian.  But he threw a burden of moral proof on to the raider, and in a moment the latter was trying to demonstrate that he might be a better fellow than circumstances would seem to indicate.

After waking this New Englander to kill him on account of his politics, he spent twenty minutes on the witness stand trying to prove an alibi.  He went into his personal history at length.  He explained matters from the time when he had been a tough little kid who wouldn’t say his prayers, and became quite sentimental in recalling how one thing had led to another, and that to something worse, and so on, until—­well, here he was, and a mighty bad business to be in, pardner.  His last request, in riding away, was:  ‘Now, pardner, don’t think too hard of me, will you?’

The personal equation is eternally throwing the burden of proof on the people it controls, and forever raising moral issues.  The man who has it may operate by no definite plan, just as this clergyman had none for saving his own life.  But he will be a confidence man of the most subtle character.  His capacity for expecting things of those under him will be tremendous.  Subordinates may never have demanded much of themselves.  But for him they will accomplish wonders, just because he expects them to.