Part 65 (2/2)

”So perish all such enemies of Virginia! All such enemies of the Union!

All such foes of the human race!”

Yet even as the trap was sprung, in the Capitol of the greatest State of the North, the leaders of the crowd were firing a hundred guns as a dirge for their martyr hero.

A criminal paranoiac had become the leader of twenty millions of people.

The mob mind had caught the disease of his insanity and a nation began to go mad.

Robert E. Lee, in command of the forces of Law and Order, watched the swaying ghostly figure with a sense of deep foreboding for the future.

CHAPTER x.x.xV

John Brown's body lay molderingin the grave but his soul was marching on. And his soul was a thousand times mightier than his body had ever been.

While living, his abnormal mind repelled men of strong personality.

He had never been able to control more than two dozen people in any enterprise which he undertook. And in these small bands rebellions always broke out.

The paranoiac had been transfigured now into the Hero and the Saint through the wors.h.i.+p of the mob which his insanity had created. His apparent strength of character was in reality weakness, an incapacity to master himself or control his criminal impulses. But the Jacobin mind of his followers did not consider realities. They only cherished dreams, illusions, a.s.sertions. The mob never reasons. It only believes. Reason is submerged in pa.s.sion.

John Brown was a typical Jacobin leader. He was first and last a Puritan mystic. The G.o.d he wors.h.i.+pped was a fiend, but he wors.h.i.+pped Him with all the more pa.s.sionate devotion for that reason. When he committed murder on the Pottawattomie he stalked his prey as a panther. He sang praises to his G.o.d as he paused in the brush before he sprang. His narrow mind, with a single fixed idea, was inaccessible to any influences save those which fed his mania. Nothing could loose the grip of his soul on this dream. He closed his glittering eyes and refused to consider anything that might contradict his faith.

He acted without reason, driven blindly forward by an impulse. When his cunning mind used reason it was never for the purpose of finding truth.

It was only for the purpose of confounding his enemies. He never used it as a guide to conduct.

By the magic of mental contagion he had transferred from the scaffold this Jacobin mind to the soul of a nation. The contact of persons is not necessary to transfer this disease. Its contagion is electric. It moves in subtle thought waves, as a mysterious pestilence spreads in the night. The mob mind, once formed, is a new creation and becomes with amazing rapidity a resistless force. The reason for its uncanny power lies in the fact that when once formed it is dominated by the unconscious, not the conscious forces, of man's nature. Its credulity is boundless. Its pa.s.sions dominate all life. The records of history are a sealed book. Experience does not exist.

Impulse rules the universe.

And this mob mind moves always as a unit. It devours individuality. Men who as individuals may be gentle and humane are swept into accord with the most beastly cry of the crowd. This mental unity grows out of the crus.h.i.+ng power of contagion. Gestures, cries, deeds of hate and fury are caught, approved, repeated.

Any lie can be built into a religion if repeated often enough to a crowd by a mind on fire with its pa.s.sions. Pirates have died as bravely as John Brown. The glorification of the manner of his dying was merely a phenomenon of the unity of the crowd mind. It was precisely the grip of his Puritan mysticism, his wors.h.i.+p of the Devil, that gave to his insanity its most dangerous appeal.

For the first time in the history of the republic the mob mind had mastered the collective soul of its people. The contagion had spread both North and South. In the North by sympathy, in the South by a process of reaction even more violent and destructive of reason.

John Brown had realized his vision of the Plains. He had raised a National Blood Feud.

No hand could stay the scourge. The Red Thought burst into a flame that swept North and South, as a prairie fire sweeps the stubble of autumn.

_Uncle Tom's Cabin_ had prepared the stubble.

From the Northern press began to pour a stream of vindictive abuse. A fair specimen of this insanity appeared in the New York _Independent_:

”The ma.s.s of the population of the Atlantic Coast of the slave region of the South are descended from the transported convicts and outcasts of Great Britain. Oh, glorious chivalry and hereditary aristocracy of the South! Peerless first families of Virginia and Carolina! Progeny of the highwaymen, the horse thieves and sheep stealers and pickpockets of Old England!”

The fact that this paper was a religious publication, the outgrowth of the New England conscience, gave its columns a peculiar power over the Northern mind.

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