As a drama it proved a great success, not only in America and England but in France and other countries as well.

More than a million copies of the story were sold in the British Empire.

Lord Palmerston avers that he had not read a novel for thirty years, yet he read Uncle Tom's Cabin three times and commended the book for the statesmanship displayed in it.
What is in the story to call forth such commendation from the cold-blooded English statesman?
The book revealed, in a way fitted to carry conviction to every unprejudiced reader, the impossibility of uniting slavery with freedom under the same Government.

Either all must be free or the mass subject to the few--or there is actual war.

This principle is finely brought out in the predicament of the Quaker confronted by a fugitive with wife and child who had seen a sister sold and conveyed to a life of shame on a Southern plantation.