Chapter 8 - Page 2

but inspiring and soul-satisfying. He kept a room in his house always ready for fugitives, having with him as many as eleven at a time. He would keep them over night, pay their fare on the train for Canada, and give them half a dollar extra. And Canada, to her eternal honor be it said, received these assisted emigrants, with their fifty cents apiece, of alien race, debauched by slavery, gave them welcome and protection, refused to enter into diplomatic relations for their rendition to bondage, and spoke well of them as men and citizens when Henry Clay and the other slave [pro-slavery] leaders denounced them as the most worthless of their class. The example of Canada may be commended to those persons in the United States, of little faith, who, because in thirty years the emancipated race have not equalled the white man in achievement, are fearful lest nothing good can be expected of them.

In the stirring years of the early fifties Douglass led a busy life. He had each week to fill the columns of his paper and raise the money to pay its expenses. Add to this his platform work and the underground railroad work, which consisted not only in personal aid to the fugitives, but in raising money to pay their expenses, and his time was very adequately employed. In every anti-slavery meeting his face was welcome, and his position as a representative of his own peculiar people was daily strengthened.

When Uncle Tom's Cabin, in 1852, set the world on fire over the wrongs of the slave,--or rather the wrongs of slavery, for that wonderful book did not portray the negro as the only sufferer from this hoary iniquity,--Mrs. Stowe, in her new capacity as a champion of liberty, conceived the plan of raising a fund for the benefit of the colored race, and in 1853 invited Douglass to visit her at Andover, Massachusetts, where she consulted with him in reference to the establishment of an industrial institute or trades school for colored youth, with a view to improving their condition in the free States. Douglass approved heartily of this plan, and through his paper made himself its sponsor. When, later on, Mrs. Stowe abandoned the project, Douglass was made the subject of some criticism, though he was not at all to blame for Mrs. Stowes altered plans. In our own time the value of such institutions has been widely recognized, and the success of those at Hampton and Tuskegee has stimulated anew the interest in industrial education as one important factor in the elevation of the colored race.

In the years from 1853 to 1860 the slave power, inspired with divine madness, rushed headlong toward its doom. The arbitrary enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Act; the struggle between freedom and slavery in Kansas; the Dred Scott decision, by which a learned and subtle judge, who had it within his power to enlarge the boundaries of human liberty and cover his own name with glory, deliberately and laboriously summarized and dignified with the