880 THOMAS WENTWORTH HIGGINSON. 



escorted to his last resting place by a guard of colored men, a fitting 

 tribute on their part to the devotion of his life to the cause of the 

 down -trodden of their race. 



When the Colonel entered the field of active life he devoted his 

 energies to three causes : Freedom for the colored race ; freedom from 

 the trammels of the law, for women ; freedom in religions belief from 

 the restraints of dogma. To the first of these causes he sacrificed, in 

 his youth at least, social position and political ambition, and later the 

 chance of military promotion. To a certain extent the championship 

 of the second and third of these causes could only be prosecuted dur- 

 ing the same period under similar disadvantages. Coupled with these 

 three reforms, but holding a secondary position in his esteem, was the 

 open advocacy of Outdoor Exercise or Athletics, of Higher Education 

 for Women, and of Temperance for all. 



He lived to see the slave released from bondage and to see Woman's 

 Suffrage adopted in several of our states. He attended services in 

 later life in a church where Theodore Parker would have been wel- 

 comed in the pulpit. He had but to cast his eyes across the Charles 

 to see, in the Stadium, the evidence of the extraordinary hold upon 

 modern collegiate life developed by athletics and intercollegiate 

 games. The group of buildings made use of by Radcliffe College for 

 the higher education of women in Cambridge he might daily see, and 

 he might also have heard that the preponderant number of women in 

 some of the Western State universities made it questionable in the 

 minds of some philosophic observers whether in the near future it 

 might not prove that there would be a body of highly educated females 

 in these states, while the bulk of the men, absorbed in business and 

 industries, would be found to have contented themselves with a high 

 school education. If in his latter days he had travelled from Maine to 

 the Mexican border he would have found that Prohibition had so far 

 prevailed that a thirsty man would often have to wait for entry into 

 an unprogressive state if he wanted anything stronger than water to 

 drink. There still remained fields in which, if strength had been 

 granted him, he might as a reformer have worked. International 

 arbitration, civil service reform, and the abolition of monopolies are to 

 be found in his list of what remains to be accomplished. 



Any man who reads Colonel Higginson's accounts of his personal 

 experiences will realize not only that he was a courageous man, being 

 absolutely devoid of fear, but also that he actually thirsted for adven- 

 ture. He would have enjoyed being present at the liberation of 

 Shadrach, not alone because the rescue of the slave was in accord with 

 his moral convictions, but because of an impulse in his blood which he 



