nce in history or space; but let some significant event
like the present occur in our midst, and we discover, often, this
distance and this strangeness between us and our nearest neighbors. They
are our Austrias, and Chinas, and South Sea Islands. Our crowded society
becomes well spaced all at once, clean and handsome to the eye,--a
city of magnificent distances. We discover why it was that we never got
beyond compliments and surfaces with them before; we become aware of as
many versts between us and them as there are between a wandering
Tartar and a Chinese town. The thoughtful man becomes a hermit in the
thoroughfares of the market-place. Impassable seas suddenly find their
level between us, or dumb steppes stretch themselves out there. It is
the difference of constitution, of intelligence, and faith, and not
streams and mountains, that make the true and impassable boundaries
between individuals and between states. None but the like-minded can
come plenipotentiary to our court.

I read all the newspapers I could get within a week after this event,
and I do not remember in them a single expression of sympathy for these
men. I have since seen one noble statement, in a Boston paper, not
editorial. Some voluminous sheets decided not to print the full report
of Brown's words to the exclusion of other matter. It was as if a
publisher should reject the manuscript of the New Testament, and print
Wilson's last speech. The same journal which contained this pregnant
news, was chiefly filled, in parallel columns, with the reports of the
political conventions that were being held. But the descent to them was
too steep. They should have been spared this contrast,--been printed in
an extra, at least. To turn from the voices and deeds of earnest men to
the cackling of political conventions! Office-seekers and speech-makers,
who do not so much as lay an honest egg, but wear their breasts bare
upon an egg of chalk! Their great game is the game of straws, or rather
that universal aboriginal game of the platter, at which the Indians
cried hub, bub! Exclude the reports of religious and political
conventions, and publish the words of a living man.

But I object not so much to what they have omitted, as to what they
have inserted. Even the Liberator called it "a misguided, wild, and
apparently insane--effort." As for the herd of newspapers and magazines,
I do not chance to know an editor in the country who will deliberately
print anything