All sections of the country do not agree in regard to whether _Uncle Tom's
Cabin_ gives a fairly representative picture of slavery. This is a question
for the historian, not for the literary critic. We study _Macbeth_ for its
psychology, its revelation of human nature, its ethics, more than for its
accurate exposition of the Scottish history of the time. We read _Uncle
Tom's Cabin_ to find out how the pen of one woman proved stronger than the
fugitive slave laws of the United States, how it helped to render of no
avail the decrees of the courts, and to usher in a four years' war. We
decide that she achieved this result because the pictures, whether
representative or not, which she chose to throw on her screen, were such as
appealed to the most elemental principles of human nature, such as the
mother could not forget when she heard her own children say their evening
prayer, such as led her to consent to send her firstborn to the war, such
as to make _Uncle Tom's Cabin_ outsell every other book written by an
American, to cause it to be translated into more than thirty foreign
languages, to lead a lady of the Siamese court to free all her slaves in
1867, and to say that Mrs.
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