Thanks to God, I said, as I read it, a hunker cannot live in Massachusetts without being wider awake than he imagines. He must imbibe fanaticism. Insurrection is epidemic in the State; treason is our inheritance. The Puritans planted it in the very structure of the State; and when their children try to curse a martyr, like the prophet of old, half the curse, at least, turns into a blessing. I thank God for that Massachusetts! Let us not blame our neighbors too much. There is something in the very atmosphere that stands above the ashes of the Puritans that prevents the most servile of hearts from holding a meeting which the despots of Virginia can relish. They do not know how to be servile within forty miles of Plymouth. They have not learned the part; with all their wish, they play it awkwardly. It is the old stiff Puritan trying to bend, and they do it with a marvellous lack of grace.

I read encouragement in the very signs, the awkward attempts made to resist this very effort of the glorious martyr of the northern hills of New York. Virginia herself looks into his face, and melts; she has nothing but praises. She tries to scan his traits; they are too manly, and she bows. Her press can only speak of his manhood. One has to get outside the influence of his personal presence before the slaves of Virginia can dig up a forgotten Kansas lie, and hurl it against the picture which Virginian admiration has painted. That does not come from Virginia. Northern men volunteer to do the work which Virginia, lifted for a moment by the sight of martyrdom, is unable to accomplish. A Newburyport man comes to Boston, and says that he knows John Brown was at the massacre of Pottawatomie. He was only twenty-five miles off! The Newburyport orator gets within thirty miles of the truth, and that is very near, for him! But Virginia was unable mark

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you!— Virginia was unable to criticise. She could only bow. It is the most striking evidence of the majesty of the action.

There is one picture which stands out in bright relief in this event. On that mountain side of the Adirondack, up among the snows, there is a plain cottage “plain living and high thinking," as Wordsworth says. Grouped there are a family of girls and boys, the oldest hardly over twenty; sitting supreme, the majestic spirit of a man just entering age, life, one purpose. Other men breed their sons for ambition, avarice, trade; he breeds his for martyrdom, and they accept serenely their places. Hardly a book under that roof but the Bible. No sound so familiar as prayer. He takes them in his right hand and in his left, and goes down to the land of bondage. Like the old Puritans of two hundred years ago, the muskets are on one side and the pikes upon the other; but the morning prayer goes up from the domestic altar as it rose from the lips of Brewster and Carver, and no morsel is ever tasted without that same grace which was made at Plymouth and Salem; and at last he flings himself against the gigantic system which trembles under his single arm.

You measure the strength of a blow by the force of the rebound. Men thought Virginia a Commonwealth; he reveals it a worse than Austrian despotism. Neighbors dare not speak to each other: no man can travel on the highway without a passport; the telegraph wires are sealed, except with a permit; the State shakes beneath the tramp of cannon and armed men. What does she fear? Conscience! The Apostle has come to torment her, and he finds the weakest spot herself. She dares not trust the usual forms of justice. Arraigned in what she calls her court is a wounded man, on a pallet, unable to stand. The civilized world stands aghast. She

says, "It is necessary." Why? "I stand on a volcano. The Titans are heaving beneath the mountains. Thought -the earthquake of conscience is below me." It is the acknowledgment of defeat. The Roman thought, when he looked upon the cross, that it was the symbol of infamy, only the vilest felon hung there. One sacred sacrifice, and the cross nestles in our hearts, the emblem of everything holy. Virginia erects her gibbet, repulsive in name and form. One man goes up from it to God, with two hundred thousand broken fetters in his hands, and henceforth it is sacred forever.

I said that, to vindicate Puritanism, the children must be better than the fathers. Lo, this event! Brewster and Carver and Bradford and Winthrop faced a New England winter and defied law for themselves. For us, their children, they planted and sowed. They said, "Lo! our rights are trodden under foot; our cradles are not safe; our prayers may not ascend to God." They formed a State, and achieved that liberty. John Brown goes a stride beyond them. Under his own roof, he might pray at liberty; his own children wore no fetters. In the catalogue of Saxon heroes and martyrs, the Ridleys and the Latimers, he only saw men dying for themselves; in the brave souls of our own day, he saw men good as their fathers; but he leaped beyond them, and died for a race whose blood he did not share. This child of seventeen years gives her husband for a race into whose eyes she never looked. Braver than Carver or Winthrop, more disinterested than Bradford, broader than Hancock or Washington, pure as the brightest names on our catalogue, nearer God's heart, for, with a divine magnanimity he comprehended all races, Ridley and Latimer minister before him. He sits in that heaven of which he showed us the open door, with the great men of Saxon blood ministering

below his feet. And yet they have a right to say, "We created him."

Lord Bacon, as he takes his march down the centuries, may put one hand on the telegraph, and the other on the steam engine, and say, "These are mine, for I taught you to invent." So the Puritans may put one hand on John Brown and say, "You are ours, though you have gone beyond us, for we taught you to believe in God. We taught you to say, God is God, and trample wicked laws under your feet." And now from that Virginia gibbet, he says to us, "The maxim I taught you, practise it! The principle I have manifested to you, apply it! If the crisis becomes sterner, meet it! If the battle is closer, be true to my memory! Men say my act was a failure. I showed what I promised, that the slave ought to resist, and could. Sixteen men I placed under the shelter of English law, and then I taught the millions. Prove that my enterprise was not a failure, by showing a North ready to stand behind it. I am willing, in God's service, to plunge with ready martyrdom into the chasm that opens in the forum, only show yourselves worthy to stand upon my grave!"

It seems to me that this is the lesson of Puritanism, as it is read to us to-day. "Law and order" are only names for the halting ignorance of the last generation. John Brown is the impersonation of God's order and God's law, moulding a better future, and setting it for an example.

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THE EDUCATION OF THE PEOPLE.

Address delivered in the Representatives' Chamber, Boston, March 10, 1859.

In connection with this lecture the following remarks of Mr. Phillips in regard to our public school methods of instruction may well find place. They were delivered in Boston, in December, 1876.

"The public schools teach her arithmetic, philosophy, trigonometry, geometry, music, botany, and history, and all that class of knowledge. Seven out of ten of them, remember, are to earn their bread by the labor of their hands. Well, at fifteen we give that child back to her parents utterly unfitted for any kind of work that is worth a morsel of bread. If the pupil could only read the ordinary newspaper to three auditors it would be something, but this the scholar, so educated, so produced, cannot do. I repeat it. Four fifths of the girls you present to society at fifteen cannot read a page intelligibly. We produce only the superficial result of the culture we strive for.

"Now I claim that this kind of education injures the boy or girl in at least three ways. First, they are able only by forgetting what they have learned to earn their day's bread; in the second place, it is earned reluctantly; third, there is no ambition for perfection

aroused.

"It seems to be a fact which many of the public educators of to-day overlook, that seven tenths of the people born into the world earn their living on matter and not ou mind. Now, friends, I protest against this whole system of common schools in Massachusetts. It lacks the first element of preparation for life. We take the young girl or the young boy whose parents are able to lift them into an intellectual profession; we keep them until they are eighteen years old in the high schools; we teach them the sciences; they go to the