Page:The life and letters of John Brown (Sanborn).djvu/137

1858. with him, "I always told her that when the time came to fight against slavery, that conflict would be the signal for our separation. She made up her mind to have me go long before this; and when I did go, she got ready bandages and medicine for the wounded."

"For twenty years," he told Richard Hinton in 1858, "I have never made any business arrangement which would prevent me at any time answering the call of the Lord. I have kept my affairs in such condition that in two weeks I could wind them up and be ready to obey that call; permitting nothing to stand in the way of duty,—neither wife, children, nor worldly goods. Whenever the time should come, I was ready; that hour is very near at hand, and all who are willing to act should be ready."

In 1820, at the time of the Missouri Compromise, when his hostility to slavery took definite shape; in 1837, when he formed his plans for attacking slavery by force; and even in 1858, when he had organized an armed band to carry them out,—his scheme would have seemed mere madness to most persons. But Brown had the spirit of his ancestors, the Pilgrim Fathers; he entered upon his perilous undertaking with deliberate resolution, after considering what was to be said for and against it, as did the Pilgrims before they set forth from Holland to colonize America. William Bradford, their bravest leader and their historian, has recorded the arguments for attempting the voyage to America in words which will apply, with very little change, to the adventure undertaken two centuries and a half later by Peter Brown's stalwart descendant, the last of the Puritans.

"'It was answered,' says Bradford in his History, 'that all great and honourable actions are accompanied with great difficulties, and must be both enterprised and overcome with answerable courages. It was granted the dangers were great, but not desperate; the difficulties were many, but not invincible. For though there were manie of them likely, yet they were not certain. It might be sundrie of the things feared might never befall; others, by provident care and the use of good means, might in a great measure be prevented; and all of them, through the help of God, by fortitude and patience, might either he borne or overcome. True it was that such attempts were not to be made and undertaken without good ground and reason; not rashly or lightly as"