"Won't ye come in?"
They merely passed on. The infinite pathos of the scene had made no impression. That this child's presence on the streets was enough to damn the whole system of society to the lowest hell never dawned on the philanthropist or the man of Action.
The crowd in the hall was not large. The place was about half full and it seated barely five hundred. The masses of the North as yet took no stock in the Abolition Crusade.
They felt the terrific pressure of the problem of life at home too keenly to go into hysterics over the evils of Negro Slavery in the South. William Lloyd Garrison had been preaching his denunciations for twenty-one years and its fruits were small. The masses of the people were indifferent.
But a man was pushing his way to the platform of the little hall to-night who was destined to do a deed that would accomplish what all the books and all the magazines and all the newspapers of the Crusaders had tried in vain to do.
Small as the crowd was, there was something sinister in its composition.
Half of them were foreigners. It was the first wave of the flood of
degradation for our racial stock in the North—the racial stock of John
Adams and John Hancock.
A few workingmen were scattered among them. Fifty or sixty negroes occupied the front rows. Sam had secured a seat on the aisle. Gerrit Smith rose without ceremony and introduced Brown. There were no women present. He used the formal address to the American voter:
"Fellow Citizens:
"I have the honor to present to you to-night a man chosen of God to lead our people out of the darkness of sin, my fellow worker in the Kingdom, the friend of the downtrodden and the oppressed, John Brown."
Faint applause greeted the old man as he moved briskly to the little table with his quick, springing step.