work in a thousand little ways. But the call? Were they asked to sacrifice themselves to free their fellow-slaves? Were they not quite ready? No—to do that they stood ever ready. But here they were asked to sacrifice themselves for the sake of possibly freeing a few slaves and certainly arousing the nation. They saw what John Brown did not fully realize until the last: the tremendous meaning of sacrifice even though his enterprise failed and they were sure it would fail. Yet in truth it need not have failed. History and military science prove its essential soundness. But the Negro knew little of history and military science. He did know slavery and the slave power, and they loomed large and invincible in his fertile imagination. He could not conceive their overthrow by anything short of the direct voice of God. That a supreme sacrifice of human beings on the altar of Moloch might hasten the day of emancipation was possible, but were they called to give their lives to this forlorn hope? Most of them said no, as most of their fellows, black and white, ever answer to the "voice, without reply." They said it reluctantly, slowly, even hesitatingly, but they said it even as their leader Douglass said it. And why not, they argued? Was not their whole life already a sacrifice? Were they called by any right of God or man to give more than they already had given? What more did they owe the world? Did not the world owe them an unpayable amount?
Then, too, the sacrifice demanded of black men
