them; and he powerfully illustrates the diabolism of that system which
keeps in chains and darkness a host of minds, which, if free and
enlightened, would shine among men like stars in a firmament."

Another member of that Society speaks thus of him:--"I need not attempt
any description of the ability and efficiency which characterized his
speaking throughout the meetings. To you who know him so well, it is
enough to say that his lectures were worthy of himself. He has left an
impression on the minds of the people, that few could have done. Cold,
indeed, must be the heart that could resist the appeals of so noble a
specimen of humanity, in behalf of a crushed and despised race."

Notwithstanding the celebrity Mr. Brown had acquired in the north, as a
man of genius and talent, and the general respect his high character had
gained him, the slave spirit of America denied him the rights of a
citizen. By the constitution of the United States, he was every moment
liable to be seized and sent back to slavery. He was in daily peril of a
gradual legalized murder, under a system one of whose established
economical principles is, that it is more profitable to work up a slave
on a plantation in a short time, by excessive labour and cheap food,
than to obtain a lengthened remuneration by moderate work and humane
treatment. His only protection from such a fate was the anomaly of the
ascendancy of the public opinion over the law of the country. So
uncertain, however, was that tenure of liberty, that even before the
passage of the Fugitive Slave Law, it was deemed expedient to secure the
services of Frederick Douglass to the anti-slavery cause by the purchase
of his freedom. The same course might have been taken to secure the
labours of Mr. Brown, had he not entertained an unconquerable repugnance
to its adoption. On the 10th of January, 1848, Enoch Price wrote to Mr.
Edmund Quincy offering to sell Mr. Brown to himself or friends for 325