es far
removed from local partizan prejudice, it was immediately received as
a great revelation of the spirit of liberty. It was translated into
twenty-three different languages. So devoted were the Italians to the
reading of the story that there was earnest effort to suppress its
circulation. As a drama it proved a great success, not only in America
and England but in France and other countries as well. More than a
million copies of the story were sold in the British Empire. Lord
Palmerston avers that he had not read a novel for thirty years, yet
he read Uncle Tom's Cabin three times and commended the book for the
statesmanship displayed in it.

What is in the story to call forth such commendation from the
cold-blooded English statesman? The book revealed, in a way fitted to
carry conviction to every unprejudiced reader, the impossibility of
uniting slavery with freedom under the same Government. Either all must
be free or the mass subject to the few--or there is actual war. This
principle is finely brought out in the predicament of the Quaker
confronted by a fugitive with wife and child who had seen a sister sold
and conveyed to a life of shame on a Southern plantation. "Am I going to
stand by and see them take my wife and sell her?" exclaimed the negro.
"No, God help me! I'll fight to the last breath before they shall take
my wife and son. Can you blame me?" To which the Quaker replied: "Mortal
man cannot blame thee, George. Flesh and blood could not do otherwise.
'Woe unto the world because of offences but woe unto them through whom
the offence cometh.'" "Would not even you, sir, do the same, in my
place?" "I pray that I be not tried." And in the ensuing events the
Quaker played an important part.

Laws enacted for the protection of slave property are shown to be
destructive of the fundamental rights of freemen; they are inhuman. The
Ohio Senator, who in his lofty preserve at the capital of his country
could discourse eloquently of his readiness to keep faith with the
South in the matter of the faithful execution of the Fugitive Slave Law,
becomes, when at home with his family, a flagrant violator of the law.
Elemental human nature is pitted against the apparent interests of a few
individual slaveowners. The story of Uncle Tom placed all supporters
of the new law on the defensive. It was read by all classes North and
South. "Uncle Tom's Cabin as it is" was called forth from the South as a
reply to Mrs. Stowe's boo