shipped was a fiend, but he worshipped Him with
all the more passionate devotion for that reason. When he committed
murder on the Pottawattomie he stalked his prey as a panther. He sang
praises to his God as he paused in the brush before he sprang. His
narrow mind, with a single fixed idea, was inaccessible to any
influences save those which fed his mania. Nothing could loose the grip
of his soul on this dream. He closed his glittering eyes and refused to
consider anything that might contradict his faith.

He acted without reason, driven blindly forward by an impulse. When his
cunning mind used reason it was never for the purpose of finding truth.
It was only for the purpose of confounding his enemies. He never used it
as a guide to conduct.

By the magic of mental contagion he had transferred from the scaffold
this Jacobin mind to the soul of a nation. The contact of persons is not
necessary to transfer this disease. Its contagion is electric. It moves
in subtle thought waves, as a mysterious pestilence spreads in the
night. The mob mind, once formed, is a new creation and becomes with
amazing rapidity a resistless force. The reason for its uncanny
power lies in the fact that when once formed it is dominated by the
unconscious, not the conscious forces, of man's nature. Its credulity is
boundless. Its passions dominate all life. The records of history are a
sealed book. Experience does not exist.

Impulse rules the universe.

And this mob mind moves always as a unit. It devours individuality. Men
who as individuals may be gentle and humane are swept into accord with
the most beastly cry of the crowd. This mental unity grows out of the
crushing power of contagion. Gestures, cries, deeds of hate and fury are
caught, approved, repeated.

Any lie can be built into a religion if repeated often enough to a crowd
by a mind on fire with its passions. Pirates have died as bravely as
John Brown. The glorification of the manner of his dying was merely a
phenomenon of the unity of the crowd mind. It was precisely the grip
of his Puritan mysticism, his worship of the Devil, that gave to his
insanity its most dangerous appeal.

For the first time in the history of the republic the mob mind had
mastered the collective soul of its people. The contagion had spread
both North and South. In the North by sympathy, in the South by a
process of reaction even more violent and destructive of reason.

John Brown had realized his vision