mother for bread when she has none to give." At ten years of age, he says, he left his poor New Hampshire home to earn thereafter his own living as a bond boy to a neighboring farmer. He was to serve until twenty-one years of age; to have food and raiment, one month's schooling in the winter, and six sheep and a yoke of oxen when his time of service expired. He was so poor that up to his twenty-first year "a single dollar would cover every penny he had ever spent." But from his childhood he had an inspiration that did for him what a fortune could not have done without it. It made him great. This was an inspiration for knowledge, inherited perchance from his mother, who was "fond of reading." And so this poor bond boy began his service by reading over and over again a New Testament a neighbor had given him, and the few schoolbooks he could get, and then a lady, noticing the forlorn lad's fondness for books, began to lend him some volumes from her husband's library. And the boy toiled in the fields in summer and in the forest in winter, till the evening stars appeared, and then, when his work was done, he would crouch by the kitchen fire (for he had no money to buy lights), and read hour after hour, and, sometimes forgetting himself, he would read till the morning dawned. His employer never had cause to complain that he neglected his tasks, however hard they were, for the lad had good health, and was an industrious, willing laborer. At the end of his indenture he had read near a thousand volumes of the best American and English literature that he could borrow; works of history, philosophy, biography, and general literature. He sold his six sheep and yoke of oxen for eighty-six dollars cash, and that seemed a fortune to him, who up to that hour had never possessed so much as two dollars in money. He then worked a few months in the neighborhood for a small pittance, but his mind had grown, and he was restless to do better, and so he set out to look for a fortune elsewhere.

After he had become the vice-president of the United States, he told the citizens of Great Falls, N. H., when there on a visit,

of this experience. He said: "I know what it is to travel weary miles on foot, and ask my fellow men to give me leave to toil. I remember that in 1833 I walked into your village from my native town, and went through your mills seeking employment. If anybody had offered me eight or nine dollars a month I should have accepted it gladly. I went to Salmon Falls, I went to Dover, I went to New Market, and tried to get work, without success; I returned home weary, but not discouraged, and put my pack on my back, and walked to the town where I now live, and learned the mechanic's trade. I know the hard lot that toiling men have to endure in this world, and every pulsation of my heart, every conviction of my judgment, puts me on the side of the toiling men of my country,―aye, and of all countries. I am glad the workingmen of Europe are getting discontented and want better wages. I thank God that a man in the United States to-day can earn from three to four dollars in ten hours' work easier than he could forty years ago earn one dollar working from twelve to fifteen hours. The first month I worked after I was twentyone years of age, I went into the woods, drove team, cut mill logs, rose in the morning before daylight, and worked hard until after dark at night, and I received for it the magnificent sum of six dollars, and, when I got the money, those dollars looked as large to me as the moon looks to-night."

He spent a dollar and five cents in traveling that hundred miles on foot to Natick, Mass., twenty-five cents of it for a pair of slippers to ease his blistered feet. Then this future statesman agreed to work for five months for nothing, that he might learn the trade of making shoes. At the end of seven weeks, he found he had made a bad bargain, and, anxious to do something to obtain the education he had set his heart on getting, he bought his release for fifteen dollars, and began trade for himself, working sixteen hours a day, and often all night long as well. At the end of two years of such unremitting toil, he had saved several hundred dollars towards gaining an educa tion for the practice of law, but now, in 1836, strength and

health gave way, and, acting under the physician's advice, he went to Washington, D. C., for rest and recreation. Passing through Maryland, he saw for the first time what he had hitherto only heard of, the slave toiling under his taskmaster, and was told he must keep silence concerning it while in the state of Maryland. While in Washington, he visited the notorious slave-pen of Williams, on the corner of Seventh and B streets; saw men and women sold as cattle for the crime of having been given by their Creator a black skin; saw husband and wife, mother and child, separated, manacled, whipped, and marched off to a doom that was often worse than death; saw it done by authority of the Government. What the effect was upon him, he himself when United States senator has told.

In an address given at Philadelphia, in 1863, during the dark days of the civil war, he said, alluding to this visit: "I saw slavery beneath the shadow of the flag that waved over the Capitol. I saw the slave-pen, and men, women, and children herded for the markets of the far South; and, at the table at which sat Senator Morris of Ohio, then the only avowed champion of freedom in the Senate of the United States, I expressed my abhorrence of slavery and the slave traffic, in the capital of this democratic and Christian republic. I was promptly told that Senator Morris might be protected in speaking against slavery in the Senate, but that I should not be protected in uttering such sentiments. I left the capital of my country with the unalterable resolution to give all that I had, and all that I hoped to have, of power, to the cause of emancipation in America, and I have tried to make that resolution a living faith from that day to this. My political associates from that hour to the present have always been guided by my opposition to slavery in every form, and they always will be so guided. In twenty years of political life I may have committed errors of judgment, but I have ever striven to write my name, in the words of William Leggett, 'in ineffaceable letters on the abolition record.' Standing here to-night in the presence of veteran anti-slavery men, I can say, with all the sincerity of conviction,

that I would rather have it written upon the humble stone that shall mark the spot where I shall repose when life's labors are done, 'He did what he could to break the fetters of the slave,' than to have it recorded that he filled the highest station of honor in the gift of his countrymen."

With that single aim before him, he now returned to study at the Stafford (N. H.) Academy, laboring at his books with the same untiring industry that he had displayed in earning money for his education. Study meant business to him. His school life was unfortunately cut short by the failure of the man to whom he had intrusted his hard earnings, and he returned to Natick and began the manufacture of shoes on a capital of twelve dollars. He continued at the business ten years, employing at length over one hundred persons in his business. During all this time he never forgot his one purpose, but, by reading and the constant study of public questions, he pressed steadily towards the goal he had set.

When elected to the Legislature of Massachusetts, first as representative, and then as state senator, he stoutly and successfully battled for the removal of the unjust statutes that discriminated against the people of color in his Commonwealth. On the third day of February, 1846, he delivered before that body, when a member of the House, one of the ablest speeches ever made against slavery. In it, he frankly avowed, "I am an abolitionist, and have been a member of an abolition society for nearly ten years. I am proud of the name of abolitionist. I glory in it. I am willing to bear my full share of the odium that may now or hereafter be heaped upon it. I had far rather be one of the humblest in that little band which rallies around the glorious standard of emancipation than to have been the favorite marshal of Napoleon, and have led the Old Guard over a hundred fields of glory and renown."” It took an uncommonly brave man to declare such sentiments, even in the state of Massachusetts, at a time when Methodist ministers were expelled from their conference and from their churches in that Commonwealth for simply attending an abolition meeting.

But this man, who, as a homeless and penniless youth, had entered the state but thirteen years before, had this for his political creed, "My voice and my vote shall ever be given for the equality of all the children of men, before the laws of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, and of the United States."

In 1855, when forty-three years old, he was elected United States senator from Massachusetts to succeed Edward Everett, who had resigned, and at once he took his place by the side of his famous colleague, Charles Sumner, at a time when the halls of Congress were ringing with the fierce invectives, threats of personal violence, and oaths of fearful import, hurled by the men of the South against all who dared question the right of the demand of slavery to rule the land. Five years before, they had, by the passage of the fugitive-slave act, made the North one vast slave hunting field. But a year before they had compelled Massachusetts to give up the poor fugitive, Anthony Burns, and now, by the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska bill, their victory seemed complete; for had not a senator from Indiana publicly boasted in the Senate chamber, that in his free state they now imposed a fine upon the white man who even ventured to give employment to a free black man? Yet, in his first speech in the Senate, Henry Wilson boldly bore to these men this message as from the North: "We mean, sir, to place in the councils of the nation, men, who, in the words of Jefferson, 'have sworn on the altar of God eternal hostility to every kind of oppression of the mind and body of man.'" And when the same year, in a notable political gathering, a delegate from Virginia, with pistol in hand, approached him and denounced him as the leader of the Anti-Slavery party, he replied to him that his "threats had no terror for freemen"; that he was then and there ready to meet "argument with argument, scorn with scorn, and, if need be, blow with blow; for God had given him an arm ready and able to protect his head." It was time that champions of slavery in the South should realize the fact, "that the past was theirs, the future ours."

Those were the days of border ruffianism, when hundreds