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A Plea for Captain John Brown - Read to the citizens of Concord, Massachusetts on Sunday evening, October thirtieth, eighteen fifty-nine by Henry David Thoreau
page 12 of 28 (42%)
no doubt, are well disposed, but sluggish by constitution and by
habit, and they cannot conceive of a man who is actuated by higher
motives than they are. Accordingly they pronounce this man insane,
for they know that they could never act as he does, as long as they
are themselves.

We dream of foreign countries, of other times and races of men, placing
them at a distance in history or space; but let some significant
event like the present occur in our midst, and we discover, often,
this distance and this strangeness between us and our nearest
neighbors. They are our Austrias, and Chinas, and South Sea Islands.
Our crowded society becomes well spaced all at once, clean and
handsome to the eye,--a city of magnificent distances. We discover
why it was that we never got beyond compliments and surfaces with
them before; we become aware of as many versts between us and them
as there are between a wandering Tartar and a Chinese town. The
thoughtful man becomes a hermit in the thoroughfares of the
market-place. Impassable seas suddenly find their level between us,
or dumb steppes stretch themselves out there. It is the difference
of constitution, of intelligence, and faith, and not streams and
mountains, that make the true and impassable boundaries between
individuals and between states. None but the like-minded can come
plenipotentiary to our court.

I read all the newspapers I could get within a week after this event,
and I do not remember in them a single expression of sympathy for
these men. I have since seen one noble statement, in a Boston
paper, not editorial. Some voluminous sheets decided not to print
the full report of Brown's words to the exclusion of other matter.
It was as if a publisher should reject the manuscript of the New
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