timore on her journey when Brown heard of it and
stopped her with a peremptory command.

The determined conspirator then worked up the proposition to buy a steam
tug which could make 18 knots an hour, steam up the James River to
Richmond, kidnap the Governor of the Commonwealth, Henry Wise, and hold
him for ransom until Brown was released. The scheme only failed for the
lack of money.

Higginson had seen one thing. Brown saw a bigger thing.

Higginson's refusal to flee was based on sound psychology. He knew that
from the day John Brown struck his brutal blow at the heart of the South
and blood had begun to flow, the Blood Feud would be the biggest living
fact in the Nation's history.

He knew that he could remain in Worcester with impunity. The strength of
a revolution lies in the fact that its first bloodletting releases the
instincts of the animal in man hitherto restrained by law. He knew that
Brown's cry of Liberty for the slave would become for millions the cloak
to hide the archaic impulse to kill. He knew that while the purpose of
civilization is to restrain and control these instincts of the beast in
man--it was too late for the forces of Law and Order to rally in the
North. The first outbursts of indignation against Brown would quickly
pass. They would be futile.

He read them with a smile. The _New York Herald_ said: "He has met with
a fate which he courted, but his death and the punishment of all his
criminal associates will be as a feather in the balance against the
mischievous consequences which will probably follow from the rekindling
of the slavery excitement in the South."

The _Tribune_ took the lead in dismissing the act as the deed of a
madman. The Hartford _Evening News_ declared:

"Brown is a poor, demented, old man. The calamity would never have
occurred had there been no lawless and criminal invasion of Kansas."

But the most significant utterance in the North came from the Pacifist
leader of Abolition, William Lloyd Garrison, himself. Higginson read it
with a cry of joy.

_The Liberator's_ words of comment were brief but significant of the
coming mob mind:

"The particulars of a misguided, wild, and apparently insane, through
disinterested and well-intended effort by insurrection, to emancipate
the slaves in Virginia, under the leadership of Captain John, alias
'Osawatomie' Brown, may be found on our third page. Our views of war
and bloodshed even in the best of causes, are too well k