all her work, this rambling story of life near Boston about the beginning of the nineteenth century is careless in detail and very uneven. As you consider it, however, you grow to feel that above almost any other accessible book "Old Town Folks" sets forth the circumstances and the temper of the native Yankee people. What is more, the carefully deliberate passages the opening chapters, for example—are written in a manner which approaches excellence. In brief, Mrs. Stowe differed from most American novelists in possessing a spark of genius. Had this genius pervaded her work, she might have been a figure of lasting literary importance.

Even as it was, she had power enough to make "Uncle Tom's Cabin" the most potent literary force of the anti-v slavery days. She differed from most Abolitionists in having observed on the spot all the tragic evils of slavery. Until the publication of "Uncle Tom's Cabin," slavery had on the whole presented itself to the North as a deplorable abstraction. Wherever the book went, and it went so far that to this day dramatised versions of it are said to be popular in the country, it awakened this abstraction into life, much as powerful preaching sometimes awakens a dormant sentiment of religion. Of course, "Uncle Tom's Cabin" is partisan, but it is honestly so; and if, as occasionally seems the case, the negro characters are so white at heart that there is a certain fitness in their dramatic representation by people with temporarily blackened faces, there can be no doubt that Mrs. Stowe believed her negroes as true to life as later, and rightly, she believed the Yankees of "Old Town Folks." Whatever you may think of "Uncle Tom's Cabin," you can never truly feel it to have been instigated by a demagogic purpose. It was written by one who, like the men who maintained antislavery principles amid every social obloquy and could never have foreseen their final popularity, was profoundly convinced that her cause was supremely true.

"Uncle Tom's Cabin" was published in 1852. To its

unprecedented popularity may be perhaps traced the final turn of the public tide. After ten years the conflict between the slave States and the free reached the inevitable point of civil war. The 1st of January, 1863, saw that final proclamation of emancipation which, by confiscating, as virtually contraband property, all slaves in the States which were then in arms against the Federal government, practically achieved the end for which the antislavery men had unfalteringly striven. Into political history we cannot enter. For obvious reasons there has arisen during the last twenty-five years an antislavery legend, which has cast into an obloquy as deep as ever Abolitionists suffered the memory of every opposition to these men, whose chief heroism lay in their unflinching devotion to unpopular principle. In so far as this legend has led the growing generation of American youth to assume that because you happen to think a given form of property wrong, you have a natural right to confiscate it forthwith, the antislavery movement has perhaps tended to weaken the security of American institutions. At least in Massachusetts, too, the prevalence of this movement seems permanently to have lowered the personal dignity of public life, by substituting for the traditional rule of the conservative gentry the obvious dominance of the less educated classes. These shadows on the picture have been so generally neglected that we have perhaps allowed ourselves to dwell on them unduly. As fact begins to fade into history, it is sometimes the critical aspects of it which the world proves apt for a while to forget.

No doubt the evil of slavery was real; no doubt the spirit in which the antislavery movement attacked it was conscientious, brave, in many aspects heroic; but neither can there be doubt that the antislavery leaders of New England were of different origin from the Southerners whom they denounced, and that they mostly knew only by report the things which they abhorred. In the history of the South, for one thing, social and intellectual development had proceeded more slowly than

in the North. The social and intellectual development of America has never proceeded so fast as that of England. The England of King William III. was far more different from the England of Queen Elizabeth than was the Boston of Joseph Dudley from that of John Winthrop. In the same way there was far more likeness between the Southern States of

President Buchanan's time and the Southern States of General Washington's than between the New England of 1860 and the New England of 1789. Up to the time of the Civil War, indeed, the South still lingered in the eighteenth century; and at least in New England the force of what we have called its Renaissance was bringing men nearer to the contemporary nineteenth century of Europe than anything American between 1650 and 1800 had ever been to any Europe contemporary with itself.

Yet in the fact that the impulses of the New England reformers to set the world right finally concentrated themselves on the affairs of other people, and not on their own, there proves to be a trait which reveals how little the temper of New England has ever strayed from the temper of the mother country. For no peculiarity has been more characteristic of the native English than a passion to reform other people than themselves, trusting meantime that God will help those who forcibly help somebody else.

IX

JOHN GREENLEAF WHITTIER

AMONG the antislavery leaders of Massachusetts was one who, with the passing of time, seems more and more distinguished as a man of letters. John Greenleaf Whittier, born at Haverhill, Massachusetts, in 1807, came of sound country stock, remarkable only because for several generations the family had been Quakers. The first New England manifestations of Quakerism, in the seventeenth century, had taken an extravagantly fanatical form, which resulted in tragedies still familiar to tradition. As the Friends of New England had settled down into peaceful observance of their own principles, however, letting alone the affairs of others, they had become an inconspicuous, inoffensive body, neglected by the surrounding orthodoxy. Theologically, they believed in God, Jesus Christ, and the Bible. The interpreter of the divine word they found not in any established church nor in any officially sanctified order of ministers, but in the still, small voice given to mankind by the Heavenly Father.

"To all human beings, they held, God has given an inner light, to all He speaks with a still small voice. Follow the light, obey the voice, and all will be well. Evil-doers are they who neglect the light and the voice. Now the light and the voice are God's, so to all who will attend they must ultimately show the same truth. If the voice call us to correct others, then, or the light shine upon manifest evil, it is God's will that we smite error, if so may be by revealing truth. If those who err be Friends, our duty bids us expostulate with them; and if they be obdurate, to present them for discipline, which may result in their exclusion from our Religious Society. The still small voice, it seems, really warns everybody that certain lines of conduct are essentially wrong, among which are the drinking of spirits, the frequenting of taverns, indulgence in gaming, the use of oaths, and the enslavement of any human being."

In this faith there is clearly involved a conclusion at odds with Calvinism. To Quakers, inasmuch as every man possesses within himself the power of seeing the inner light and of hearing the still, small voice of God, all men are essentially equal. When the antislavery movement began, then, Whittier, a lifelong adherent of this traditional faith, found himself in a relation to militant philanthropy very different from that of ancestral Calvinists. These, lately emancipated by the new life of Unitarianism and Transcendentalism, came to the reform with all the hotness of head which marks converts. Whittier, on the other hand, had inherited the principles to which the men with whom he allied himself had been converted; and so, although a lifelong and earnest reformer, he is the least irritating of reformers to those who chance not to agree with him.

Again, sprung from a class which made his childhood literally that of a barefoot boy, and growing up in days when the New England country was still pure in the possession of an unmixed race whose capacity for self-government has never. been surpassed, Whittier naturally and gently, without a tinge of invidiousness, could base not only on religious theory, but also on personal inexperience, his fervent faith in the equality of mankind. In the fact that throughout his connection with the antislavery movement he unswervingly advocated the use of strictly constitutional means to bring about reform, there is again something deeply characteristic. From the beginning some abolitionists were for resort to force; but Whittier always believed that their end might be attained by the ballot. For, after all, an election is an opportunity given every mature man in the community, to declare by his vote what ought to be done and who ought to do it. Very good; if, as Whittier's faith taught him, God speaks to every human being who will listen, the voice of the people, provided they listen to the voice within them, is literally the voice of God. When a popular election goes wrong, it is only because the people have been deaf to the divine whisper of truth.