[56]
had the wool buying all their own way, did not fancy that a party should step in between them and the producers to show the latter what was for their interest, and to prevent the practice of imposition upon them.
The combination was successful, and Brown, impetuous and indignant, shipped his wools to England, to find out that the price in Massachusetts was better than in Europe.
Another writer says:
In 1848 we find him in a large woollen warehouse in Springfield, Massachusetts, where he was known as a quiet, modest man, of unswerving integrity.
Indeed, hundreds of wool-growers in Northern Ohio consigned their stock to him to be sold at discretion.
A combination of Eastern manufacturers, who wished to have no such stern and unflinching man between themselves and the wool-growers, formed in league against him, and forced him to send his wool to Europe for a market, which resulted in a second disaster, and Brown was again reduced to poverty.
The amount thus taken to
Europe was two hundred thousand pounds, which was sold in
London for half its value, and then reshipped to
Boston.
Of
John Brown's travels in
Europe, the only record in existence, as far as the writer can ascertain, is the following extract from reminiscences of conversations with him (already quoted) by a noted friend of freedom in
Massachusetts:
I heard from him an account of his travels in Europe, and his experience as a wool-grower.
He had chiefly noticed in Europe the agricultural and military equipment of the several countries he visited.
He watched reviews of the French, English, and German armies, and made his own comments on their military systems.
He thought a standing army the greatest curse to a country, because it drained off the best of the young men and left farming and the industrial arts to be managed by inferior men. The German armies he thought slow and unwieldy; the German farming was bad husbandry, because there the farmers did not live on their land, but in towns, and so wasted the natural manures which should go back to the soil.
England he thought the best cultivated country he had ever seen, but the seats of the English gentry he thought inferior to those of the wealthy among us. He visited several of the famous battle grounds of Napoleon, whose career he had followed with great interest; but he thought him
