52 ROYAL SOCIETY OF CANADA 
standards. He was taking risks, defying the laws, and making him- 
self liable to punishment, and yet could glow with the healthful 
pleasure of duty done. Above all,’ he adds, “the Underground 
Railroad was the opportunity for the bold and adventurous; it had 
the excitement of piracy, the secrecy of burglary, the daring of insur- 
rection; to the pleasure of relieving the poor negro’s sufferings it 
added the triumph of snapping one’s fingers at the slave-catcher; it 
developed coolness, indifference to danger, and quickness of resource.” 
Fred Douglass, himself frequently exposed to fine and imprison- 
ment for succouring the fugitives, writes: “ I never did more congenial, 
attractive, fascinating and satisfactory work.” 
Professor Siebert has recorded the names of over three thousand 
persons who were engaged in this heroic work, a roll of honour in 
which its members might well be proud to be inscribed. While the 
rank and file were men of humble birth and unknown to fame, yet 
some of them were persons of high position, literary culture, or heroic 
daring —men who won “glorious infamy” by their sufferings for 
the slave. We may mention Colonel Thomas Wentworth Higginson, 
Theodore Parker, Gerrit Smith, Joshua Giddings, Levi Coffin, Dr. A. 
M. Ross and many others. The futile effort of Brown, of Osawatomie, 
to emancipate the slaves in Virginia led to his execution on the scaf- 
fold; but on many a weary march and by many a lonely camp fire, 
the armies of freedom chanted the Marseillaise of the Civil War: 
“John Brown’s body lies amouldering in the grave, but his soul is 
marching on.” Its refrain, too, furnished the motive for the noble 
battle hymn of the Republic. 
‘In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea, 
With a glory in his bosom that transfigures you and me: 
As he died to make men holy, let us die to make men free, 
While God is marching on.” 
The historic record of the Quakers as unfaltering friends of 
liberty and uncompromising foes of oppression and wrong, as heroic 
confessors unto blood and martyrs unto death for righteousness and 
truth, finds further illustration in their connection with the Under- 
ground Railway. 
From very early times in the history of slavery the bondman 
had a habit of seeking his liberty when he found an opportunity. It 
is a way that slaves always and everywhere have had. So great a 
loss thus accrued to the slave holders of the American Republic that 
as early as 1793, in an unconscious irony on its own recent struggle for 
Independence, Congress passed its first Fugitive Slave Law. 
