FOREWORD.

John Brown’s life is a grand, simple epic that should inspire one to heroism. No one asks for dates and minute details on hearing the life of Jesus or Socrates. There are men who have proved their superiority to the pettiness of life, and who seem almost divine. John Brown is one of them. I think he was almost our greatest American. I know that he was the greatest man the common people of America have yet produced.

He did not become a President, a financier, a great scientist or artist; he was a plain and rather obscure farmer until his death. That is his greatness. He had no great offices, no recognition or applause of multitudes to spur him on, to feed his vanity and self-righteousness. He did his duty in silence; he was an outlaw. Only after he had been hung like a common murderer, and only after the Civil War had come to fulfill his prophecies, was he recognized as a great figure.

But in his life he was a common man to the end, a hard-working, honest, Puritan farmer with a large family, a man worried with the details of poverty, and obscure as ourselves. Now we are taught as school-children that only those who become Presidents and captains of finance are the successful ones in our democracy. John Brown proved that there is another form of success, within the reach of everyone, and that is to devote one’s life to a great and pure cause.

John Brown was hung as an outlaw; but he was a success, as Jesus and Socrates were successes. Some day school-children will be taught that his had been the only sort of success worth striving for in his time. The rest was dross; the personal success of the beetle that rolls itself a huger ball of dung than its fellow-beetles, and exults over it.

John Brown is a legend; but I still see him in the simple, obscure heroes who fight for freedom today in America. That is why I am telling his story. It is the story of thousands of men living in America now, did we but know it. John Brown is still in prison in America; yes, and he has been hung and shot down a hundred times since his first death. For his soul is marching on; it is the soul of liberty and justice, which cannot die, or be suppressed.