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propositions.
It was, as we have already said, an appeal to the imagination through a series of pictures.
People are like children, and understand pictures better than words.
Some one rushes into your dining-room while you are at breakfast and cries out, “Terrible railroad accident, forty killed and wounded, six were burned alive.”
“ Oh, shocking!
dreadful!”
you exclaim, and yet go quietly on with your rolls and coffee.
But suppose you stood at that instant by the wreck, and saw the mangled dead, and heard the piercing shrieks of the wounded, you would be faint and dizzy with the intolerable spectacle.
So Uncle Tom's Cabin made the crack of the slavedriver's whip, and the cries of the tortured blacks ring in every household in the land, till human hearts could endure it no longer.
Houghton, Mifflin and Company, The Riverside Press, Cambridge, 1889.
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