These editors, Thoreau implies, corrupt the language for financial gain. At this point in his attack upon his contemporaries' use of the words sane and insane, he points to the fact that his northern neighbors did not judge Brown's successful efforts in Kansas to be insane, and he directs his audience to ask the tyrant, who is his most dangerous foe -- the sane or the insane man? Finally, he inquires: "Do the thousands who know him best, who have rejoiced at his deeds in Kansas, and have afforded him material aid there, think him insane? Such a use of this word is a mere trope with most who persist in using it, and I have no doubt that many of the rest have already in silence retracted their words" (126).

Thoreau's various ways of using this device of attacking a commonplace definition reveal how he makes it the focus of the entire passage. This technique, which gathers others to it, emphasizes both the intellectual and moral weakness of the position he opposes. Then, when he compares the "manly directness and force" of Brown's words on being captured at Harper's Ferry to the speeches of the members of Congress from Massachusetts and other northern states, Thoreau makes explicit the point at the heart of his strategy: Correct use of language, true language, can appear only in the mouths of the good, for moral and political corruption corrupts language and its users. Brown, therefore, speaks an authentic language: "Truth is his inspirer, and earnestness the polisher of his sentences. He could afford to lose his Sharps' rifles, while he retained his faculty of speech, a Sharps' rifle of infinitely surer and longer range" (127) .