teady stare.

"God is my judge--not you, sir!"

John Brown, Jr., sided with his brother in the attack but with less
violence. His feebler mind was already trembling on the verge of
collapse.

"It cuts me to the quick," the old man finally answered, "that my own
people should not understand that I had to make an example of these
men--"

Jason finally shrieked into his ears:

"Who gave you the authority of Almighty God to sit in judgment upon your
fellow man, condemn him without trial and slay without mercy?"

The father threw up both hands in a gesture of disgust and walked from
the scene. He spent the night without sleep, wandering through the woods
and fields.

Three days later while Brown and his huntsmen were still hiding in the
timber, the people of his own settlement at Osawatomie held a public
meeting which was attended by the entire male population. They
unanimously adopted resolutions condemning in the bitterest terms the
deed.

When the old man heard of these resolutions he ground his teeth in rage.
He had thought to sweep the Territory with a Holy War in a Sacred Cause.
He expected the men who hated Slavery to applaud his Blood Offering to
the God of Freedom. Instead they had hastened to array themselves with
his foes.

Something had gone wrong in the execution of his divine vision. His
mind was stunned for the moment. But he was wrestling again with God in
prayer, while the avengers were riding to demand an eye for an eye and a
tooth for a tooth.

When the true history of man is written it will be the record of mind
not the story of the physical acts which follow the mental process.

The dangers of society are psychological, not physical. The crucial
moments of human history are not found in the hours in which armies
charge. They are found in the still small voices that whisper in the
silence of the night to a lone watcher by the fireside. They are found
in the words of will that follow hours of silent thought behind locked
doors or under the stars.

The story of man's progress, his relapses to barbarism, his victories,
his failures, his years of savage cruelties, his eras of happiness and
sorrow, must be written at last in terms of mental states.

John Brown's mind had conceived and executed the series of murders that
shocked even a Western frontier. His mind enacted the tragedy days
before the actual happening.

And it was the state of mind created by the deed that upset all his
calculat