ed: "How do you justify your
acts?" He said: "I think, my friend, you are guilty of a great wrong
against God and humanity--I say it without wishing to be offensive--and
it would be perfectly right for any one to interfere with you so far as
to free those you wilfully and wickedly hold in bondage. I think I did
right, and that others will do right who interfere with you at any time
and at all times." In a conversation still later, he is reported to
have concluded: "I wish to say furthermore that you had better--all you
people at the South--prepare yourselves for a settlement of this
question, that must come up for settlement sooner than you are prepared
for it. You may dispose of me very easily. I am nearly disposed of
now. But this question is still to be settled--this negro question I
mean. The end of that is not yet." To a friend he wrote that he
rejoiced like Paul because he knew like Paul that "if they killed him,
it would greatly advance the cause of Christ."

Lincoln, who regarded lawlessness and slavery as twin evils, could only
say of John Brown's raid: "That affair, in its philosophy, corresponds
with the many attempts related in history at the assassination of kings
and emperors. An enthusiast broods over the oppression of a people
till he fancies himself commissioned by Heaven to liberate them. He
ventures the attempt, which ends in little else than his own execution.
Orsini's attempt on Louis Napoleon and John Brown's attempt at Harper's
Ferry were, in their philosophy, precisely the same." Seward, it must
be recorded, spoke far more sympathetically of him than Lincoln; and
far more justly, for there is a flaw somewhere in this example, as his
chief biographer regards it, of "Mr. Lincoln's common-sense judgment."
John Brown had at least left to every healthy-minded Northern boy a
memory worth much in the coming years of war and, one hopes, ever
after. He had well deserved to be the subject of a song which,
whatever may be its technical merits as literature, does stir. Emerson
took the same view of him as the song writer, and Victor Hugo suggested
as an epitaph for him: "Pro Christo sicut Christus." A calmer poet,
Longfellow, wrote in his diary on Friday, December 2, 1859, the day
when Brown was hanged: "This will be a great day in our history, the
date of a new revolution, quite as much needed as the old one. Even
now, as I write, they are leading old John Brown to execution in
Virginia for a