ion
allowed, restrict slavery and prevent its extension to new territory.
Yet they knew that the constitution gave them all they desired. "Well
did they know, and well did the Southerners know, that any
anti-slavery president and congress, by their direct power of
legislation, by their control of the public patronage, and by the
application of the public moneys, could not only restrict slavery
within its present boundaries, but could secure its ultimate
abolition. The South perfectly comprehended that Mr. Lincoln, if
elected, might keep within the letter of the constitution and yet sap
the foundation of the whole slave system, and they acted
accordingly."

In answering the question, "Why did not the North let the slave states
go in peace?" Brown freely admitted the right of revolution. "The
world no longer believes in the divine right of either kings or
presidents to govern wrong; but those who seek to change an
established government by force of arms assume a fearful
responsibility--a responsibility which nothing but the clearest and
most intolerable injustice will acquit them for assuming." Here was a
rebellion, not to resist injustice but to perpetuate injustice; not to
deliver the oppressed from bondage, but to fasten more hopelessly than
ever the chains of slavery on four millions of human beings. Why not
let the slave states go? Because it would have been wrong, because it
would have built up a great slave power that no moral influence could
reach, a power that would have overawed the free Northern States,
added to its territory, and re-established the slave trade. Had
Lincoln permitted the slave states to go, and to form such a power, he
would have brought enduring contempt upon his name, and the people of
England would have been the first to reproach him.

Brown argued, as he had done in 1852, that Canada could not be
indifferent to the question, whether the dominant power of the North
American continent should be slave or free. Holding that liberty had
better securities under the British than under the American system, he
yet believed that the failure of the American experiment would be a
calamity and a blow to free institutions all over the world. For years
the United States had been the refuge of the oppressed in every land;
millions had fled from poverty in Europe to find happiness and
prosperity there. From these had been wafted back to Europe new ideas
of the rights of the people. With the fall of the U