He entered on this sea experience with his eyes open.  He had the opportunity of going on a long voyage as a passenger, but he refused it, and resolutely took the harder way of accomplishing his purpose of toughening himself.  A little incident of his boyhood gives a hint of his pluck.  His schoolmaster, angry at what he chose to call ``disobedience’’ on the excuse of a ``pretended’’ illness, told the boy to put out his left hand. ``Upon this hand,’’ wrote Dana years afterward, ``he inflicted six blows with all his strength, and then six upon the right hand.  I was in such a frenzy of indignation at his injustice and his insulting insinuation, that I could not have uttered a word for my life.  I was too small and slender to resist, and could show my spirit only by fortitude.  He called for my right hand again, and gave six more blows in the same manner, and then six more upon the left.  My hands were swollen and in acute pain, but I did not flinch nor show a sign of suffering.  He was determined to conquer, and gave six more blows upon each hand, with full force.  Still there was no sign from me of pain or submission.  I could have gone to the stake for what I considered my honor.  The school was in an uproar of hissing and scraping and groaning, and the master turned his attention to the other boys and let me alone.  He said not another word to me through the day.  If he had I could not have answered, for my whole soul was in my throat and not a word could get out. . . .  I went in the afternoon to the trustees of the school, stated my case, produced my evidence, and had an examination made.  The next morning but four boys went to school, and the day following the career of Mr. W. ended.’’

That Dana had a keen sense of injustice not merely when he himself was concerned, but whenever he was brought face to face with injustice, the reader of this book has discovered for himself, and that a high sense of honor and right was a controlling passion of his life will appear when one knows his career after he returned from his long voyage.  It rendered his attitude toward his profession, that of a lawyer, very different from that of a man merely seeking a livelihood.

Beside his work for the sailors to which I refer later there was another class of peculiarly helpless sufferers to make even stronger demand upon his sense of justice.  By his social relations and by his strong antipathy to violence of every kind, Dana would naturally have found his place amongst the men who in politics prefer orderly and regular and especially respectable associations.  He came into active life when a small band of earnest men and women were agitating for the abolition of slavery.  Some among them were also attacking the church, and proposing all sorts of changes in society.  But Dana was a man of strong religious principles and feelings, and he had little faith in any violent change in the social order.  His diaries and letters of the period show that he was annoyed by the temper