eas. The daily newspaper had just
blossomed into its full radiance in the modern world. No invention in
the history of the race has equaled the cylinder printing press as an
engine for creating crowd movements.

The daily newspaper of 1859 spoke only in the language of crowds. They
were, in fact, so many mob orators haranguing their subscribers. They
wrote down to the standards of the mob. They were molders of public
opinion and they were always the creatures of public opinion. They wrote
for the masses. Their columns were filled with their own peculiar brand
of propaganda, illusions, dreams, assertions, prejudices, sensations,
with always a cheap smear of moral platitude. Our people had grown too
busy to do their own thinking. The daily newspapers now did it for them.
There was as little originality in them as in the machines which printed
the editions. Yet they were repeated by the crowd as God-inspired truth.

We no longer needed to seek for the mob in the streets. We had it at the
breakfast table, in the office, in the counting room. The process of
crowd thinking became the habit of daily life.

John Brown hastened to use this engine of propaganda. From his
comfortable room in the jail at Charlestown there poured a daily stream
of letters which found their way into print.

A perfect specimen of his art was the concluding paragraph of a letter
to his friend and fellow conspirator, George L. Stearns of Boston.

"I have asked to be _spared_ from having any _mock or hypocritical
prayers made over me_ when I am publicly _murdered_; and that my only
_religious attendants_ be poor, _little, dirty, ragged, bareheaded
and barefooted slave boys and girls_, led by old, _gray-headed slave
mothers_,"

This message he knew would reach the heart of every Abolitionist of
the North, of every reader of _Uncle Tom's Cabin_. On the day of his
transfiguration on the scaffold he would deliver the final word that
would sweep these millions into the whirlpool of the Blood Feud.

To his wife and children he wrote a message which hammered again his
fixed idea into a dogma of faith:

"John Rogers wrote to his children, 'Abhor the arrant whore of Rome.'
John Brown writes to his children to abhor with _undying hatred_ also
the 'sum of all villainies,' slavery."

Not only did these daily letters find their way into the hands of
millions through the press, but the newspapers maintained a staff of
reporters at Charlestown to catch every