The raid of Brown and his subsequent execution, and their reception at the North revealed how vast was the revolution in public sentiment on the slavery question which had taken place there, since the murder of Lovejoy, eighteen years before.  Lovejoy died defending the right of free speech and the liberty of the press, yet the Attorney-General of Massachusetts declared that “he died as the fool dieth.”  Brown died in an invasion of a slave State, and in an effort to emancipate the slaves with a band of eighteen followers, and he was acclaimed, from one end of the free States to the other, hero and martyr.  Mr. Garrison commenting on this immensely significant fact, acutely and justly observed that:  “The sympathy and admiration now so widely felt for him, prove how marvelous has been the change affected in public opinion during the thirty years of moral agitation—­a change so great indeed, that whereas, ten years since, there were thousands who could not endure my lightest word of rebuke of the South, they can now easily swallow John Brown whole and his rifle into the bargain.  In firing his gun, he has merely told us what time of day it is.  It is high noon, thank God!”

But there is another circumstance hardly less significant of another change at the North even more momentous than the one just noted.

On December 2d, the day on which Brown was hung, solemn funeral observances were held throughout the North by Abolitionists.  At the great meeting in Boston, held in Tremont Temple, and presided over by Samuel E. Sewall, Garrison inquired as to the number of non-resistants who were present.  To this question there came a solitary reply.  There was but one non-resistant beside himself in the hall.  Where were his followers?  Why had they forsaken their principles?  The tide of Northern belligerency, which was everywhere rising to its flood, everywhere rushing and mounting to the tops of those dams which separate war and peace had swept away his followers, had caused them to forsake their principles.  True to their Anglo-Saxon instinct, they had reverted to the more human, if less Christian method of cutting the Gordian knot of the republic with the sword.

The irresistible drift of the North toward the point where peace ends and war begins, which that solitary “I” at the John Brown meeting denoted, was still further indicated by what appeared not wholly unlike a change in Mr. Garrison’s attitude on the same subject.  His non-resistant position was the same, but somehow his face seemed to turn warward too, with the rest of the nation, in the following passage taken from his address at that John Brown meeting: