upon the attempt to give power over
her honor to a lower race, civilized only in certain aspects and with
all the worst of barbarism sleeping like a tiger within it, and
occasionally displaying itself in aspect of terror, as the expression of
the feeling of the North, the ultimate goal of the fanaticism which was
rising higher and higher as the Abolitionists grew in power. To both,
John Brown represented the dominant spirit of the North; but each
translated his aspect in different ways. Each was bitterly unjust; each
was utterly in the wrong; and each was convinced with a perfect
conviction of the righteousness of her own stand and of her thought of
the other. When such position is taken, peace is doomed.

Society was disrupted. It had maintained a certain cohesion where the
sections mingled; it had been shaken, but not overthrown. But the
hanging of John Brown gave American society, as comprising all parts of
the country and devoid of sectional aspects, its death-blow. Another
society of like aspects was later to arise, perhaps never again to be
overthrown, so that we can again talk of American society in the larger
sense; but this which we know is not that which held its chief fortalice
in Washington before the capital was yielded to the perils of the centre
of strife. The daughters of even such closely contiguous States as
Pennsylvania and Virginia could not meet in social function when each
believed the other to be the representative of the most evil of
civilizations, when every interest which either most cherished was
inimical to every interest most dear to the other. Rapidly the
representatives of Southern society forsook the capital, going to their
own country, where they hoped soon to form another and yet more
brilliant circle than that which had given to the centre of our
republicanism much of the glitter and all the _prestige_ of a royal
court. The result of the presidential campaign would decide the future
of the South; but that there would be separation of the sections, for a
time or permanently, few doubted. The chief question that remained to be
decided was whether the separation would be peaceful or won at the point
of the bayonet.

Perhaps, had they foreseen the consequences of their enthusiasm, the
women of both sides would have been more moderate in their advocacy of
their respective creeds; but women rarely look to the end, and the
feminine enthusiasts of those days were no exception to the rule. Wi