character rather than Brown’s by the estimate he gave of him in a speech at Richmond.  Brown was hanged.  “Stonewall” Jackson, a brother fanatic, if that is the word, felt the spectacle “awful,” as he never felt slaughter in battle, and “put up a prayer that if possible Brown might be saved.”  “So perish all foes of the human race,” said the officer commanding on the occasion, and the South generally felt the like.

A little before his death Brown was asked:  “How do you justify your acts?” He said:  “I think, my friend, you are guilty of a great wrong against God and humanity—­I say it without wishing to be offensive—­and it would be perfectly right for any one to interfere with you so far as to free those you wilfully and wickedly hold in bondage.  I think I did right, and that others will do right who interfere with you at any time and at all times.”  In a conversation still later, he is reported to have concluded:  “I wish to say furthermore that you had better—­all you people at the South—­prepare yourselves for a settlement of this question, that must come up for settlement sooner than you are prepared for it.  You may dispose of me very easily.  I am nearly disposed of now.  But this question is still to be settled—­this negro question I mean.  The end of that is not yet.”  To a friend he wrote that he rejoiced like Paul because he knew like Paul that “if they killed him, it would greatly advance the cause of Christ.”

Lincoln, who regarded lawlessness and slavery as twin evils, could only say of John Brown’s raid:  “That affair, in its philosophy, corresponds with the many attempts related in history at the assassination of kings and emperors.  An enthusiast broods over the oppression of a people till he fancies himself commissioned by Heaven to liberate them.  He ventures the attempt, which ends in little else than his own execution.  Orsini’s attempt on Louis Napoleon and John Brown’s attempt at Harper’s Ferry were, in their philosophy, precisely the same.”  Seward, it must be recorded, spoke far more sympathetically of him than Lincoln; and far more justly, for there is a flaw somewhere in this example, as his chief biographer regards it, of “Mr. Lincoln’s common-sense judgment.”  John Brown had at least left to every healthy-minded Northern boy a memory worth much in the coming years of war and, one hopes, ever after.  He had well deserved to be the subject of a song which, whatever may be its technical merits as literature, does stir.  Emerson took the same view of him as the song writer, and Victor Hugo suggested as an epitaph for him:  “Pro Christo sicut Christus.”  A calmer poet, Longfellow, wrote in his diary on Friday, December 2, 1859, the day when Brown was hanged:  “This will be a great day in our history, the date of a new revolution, quite as much needed as the old one.  Even now, as I write, they are leading old John Brown to execution in Virginia for attempting to rescue slaves.  This is sowing the wind to reap the whirlwind, which will soon come.”