Collected works > Edinburgh edition, 1894-98 - Works of Robert Louis Stevenson > Volume 5, 1895 - Miscellanies, Volume II

MEN AND BOOKS
his example had been followed by a hundred or by
thirty of his fellows, I cannot but beheve it would
have greatly precipitated the era of freedom and
justice. We feel the misdeeds of our country with so
little fervour, for we are not witnesses to the suffering
they cause ; but when we see them wake an active
horror in our fellow-man, when we see a neighbour
prefer to He in prison rather than be so much as pas-
sively implicated in their perpetration, even the dullest
of us will begin to reahse them with a quicker pulse.
Not far from twenty years later, when Captain
John Brown was taken at Harper's Ferry, Thoreau
was the first to come forward in his defence. The
committees wrote to him unanimously that his
action was premature. ' I did not send to you for
advice,' said he, ' but to announce that I was to
speak.' I have used the word 'defence'; in truth
he did not seek to defend him, even declared it
would be better for the good cause that he should
die ; but he praised his action as I think Brown
would have liked to hear it praised.
Thus this singularly eccentric and independent
mind, wedded to a character of so much strength,
singleness, and purity, pursued its own path of self-
improvement for more than half a century, part
gymnosophist, part backwoodsman ; and thus did
it come twice, though in a subaltern attitude, into
the field of political history.
Note. — For many facts in the above essay^ among which I may mention
the incident of the squirrel, I am indebted to Thoreau: His Life and
Aims, by ' H. A. Page/ i.e., as is well known. Dr. Japp.
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