of the Abolitionists.  They were not his kind.  Nevertheless he was not a man to steer between two parties.  In a great moral crisis he was sure to take sides.  He took sides now and came out as a member of the Free Soil party.  He made a distinction, which was a clear one, between the Free Soil party and the uncompromising Abolitionists.  But in the rising heat of political feeling, other people did not make a like distinction, and Dana, a young lawyer, married now, and with a family growing up about him, found himself put out into the cold by the well-to-do, the successful, and the respectable.

Dana had a keen scent for politics, and he looked with the strongest interest upon the great political movement which was stirring the country; but he did not espouse the cause of free soil because he expected to profit by it politically.  On the contrary, he knew that he was shutting himself out from political preferment by such a course, and at the same time was imperilling his professional success.  It was the act of a man who stood up for the cause of righteousness, without counting the cost.  In like manner he now had the opportunity of illustrating afresh his attitude toward the law, for he held that law was for the accomplishment of justice, and that it was most glorious when its strong arm protected and defended the weak and downtrodden.  By a natural course, therefore, he became a prominent counsel for those unfortunate negroes who, at this time, in Boston, were held as fugitive slaves.  While the ingenuity of some was expended in putting the law on the side of the strong and the rich, Dana, who was convinced in his mind that the law of the state was honestly to be invoked in defence of the fugitive slave, gave himself heart and soul to the work of applying the law, and received no remuneration for his services in any fugitive slave case.  Instead, he received at the close of one of the most important cases, a blow from a blackguard which narrowly missed maiming him for life.  It is worth while to read what Dana wrote after rendering all the aid he could in the defence of Anthony Burns:  ``The labors of a lawyer are ordinarily devoted to questions of property between man and man.  He is to be congratulated if, though but for once, in any signal cause he can devote them to the vindication of any of the great primal rights affecting the highest interests of man.’’ He was a member of the noted Free Soil Convention at Buffalo of 1848, and presided at the first meeting of the Republican party in Massachusetts.

It may be a source of wonder to some that Dana, who achieved a great literary success in the book which he wrote when a young man, did not pursue literature as an avocation, if not as a vocation.  He published but one other book, a narrative of a trip to Cuba made in 1859, and he wrote a few magazine articles.  The explanation must be found in the temperament and character of the man.  His ``Two Years Before the Mast’’ is a vivid representation of