Cabin" grew out of a suggestion of Lord Shaftesbury's that the women of
England and Europe send their signatures to a testimonial to be
presented to Mrs. Stowe, for, when this testimonial came in, it filled
twenty-six thick folio volumes, solidly bound in morocco, and it held
the names of 562,448 women, representing every rank, from the throne of
England to the wives of the humblest artisans in Wales or the peasants
in Italy.

The message of "Uncle Tom's Cabin" is so simple that he who runs may
read. It was not written for literary critics, for scholars or for
college graduates. George Eliot wrote her "Romola" with the historian
and the philosopher and the editor of reviews ever in mind. Harriet
Beecher Stowe wrote "Uncle Tom's Cabin" for farmers, factory men,
merchants and clerks, the miscellaneous mass that make up the millions,
to rouse them to the wrongs of slavery.

In it she tried to prove two things. First, that slavery, as a system,
reacted upon the loftiest natures, distorting and injuring them. Witness
the Kentucky gentleman, Mr. Shelby. His wife was a patrician, the very
embodiment of courtesy and good-will, affection and sympathy. Her
husband was a man of honour, a representative of the bluest blood of the
old Lexington families, with a heart so gentle that the sight of a young
bird that had fallen out of the nest in the tree moved him to tears;
but, little by little, pressed by his necessities and hardened by the
spectacle of slaves bought and slaves sold, he himself sells the woman
who has been a nurse to his children, and Uncle Tom who has been like a
saviour to his own boys in the hour of their peril in forest and river,
sends both of the slaves into the cotton plantations of Louisiana,
breaking his solemn pledge to his wife and his family, in the hope that
he could escape from debt, that like a millstone weighed him into the