Page:Eminent English liberals in and out of Parliament.djvu/259

 strong pro-slavery sympathies; and young Conway returned to his Virginian home in his eighteenth year as full of anti- Northern prejudices as the rest. He commenced the study of law at Warrenton, and, while thus engaged, fell under the influence of a remarkable man, his cousin John M. Daniel, the formidable duellist editor of the notorious "Richmond Examiner." Daniel was the best educated man in Richmond, a profound student of Spinoza, Hegel, Kant, Fichte, Feuerbach, Fourier, Cousin, Voltaire. His range of vision far exceeded that of any man Conway had known, and it is scarcely to be wondered at that Daniel made a strong impression on his youthful kinsman's mind. He professed to rest slavery on a quasi-scientific basis of racial inferiorit}^ "We hold," he declared in his journal, to which Conway became a contributor, "that negroes are not men in the sense in which that term is used by the Declaration of Independence. Were the slaves men, we should be unable to disagree with Wendell Phillips."

Thus fortified in his pro-slavery ideas, Conway's next step was to become the secretary of a Southern rights, otherwise a secessionist, club, whose sole raison d'être was to break up the Union in the interest of the "peculiar institution" of the South on the first available opportunity. So much for the pernicious teaching of his misanthropic cousin. But happily other considerations began to weigh with Conway. If circumstances had leagued him with the oppressor, kind Natm'e had made him at heart an irrepressible Radical. In 1850, before the completion of his eighteenth 3'ear, appeared his first pamphlet, entitled "Free Schools in Virginia," which was distributed among the people, and laid on the desk of every member of the State Con-