dog that returns to his vomit.

  The Liberator and the Commonwealth were the only papers in Boston,
as far as I know, which made themselves heard in condemnation of the
cowardice and meanness of the authorities of that city, as exhibited
in '51. The other journals, almost without exception, by their
manner of referring to and speaking of the Fugitive Slave Law, and the
carrying back of the slave Sims, insulted the common sense of the
country, at least. And, for the most part, they did this, one would
say, because they thought so to secure the approbation of their
patrons, not being aware that a sounder sentiment prevailed to any
extent in the heart of the Commonwealth. I am told that some of them
have improved of late; but they are still eminently time-serving. Such
is the character they have won.

  But, thank fortune, this preacher can be even more easily reached by
the weapons of the reformer than could the recreant priest. The free
men of New England have only to refrain from purchasing and reading
these sheets, have only to withhold their cents, to kill a score of
them at once. One whom I respect told me that he purchased
Mitchell's Citizen in the cars, and then throw it out the window.
But would not his contempt have been more fatally expressed if he
had not bought it?

  Are they Americans? are they New Englanders? are they inhabitants of
Lexington and Concord and Framingham, who read and support the
Boston Post, Mail, Journal, Advertiser, Courier, and Times? Are
these the Flags of our Union? I am not a newspaper reader, and may
omit to name the worst.

  Could slavery suggest a more complete servility than some of these
journals exhibit? Is there any dust which their conduct does not lick,
and make fouler still with its slime? I do not know whether the Boston
Herald is still in existence, but I remember to have seen it about the
streets when Sims was carried off. Did it not act its part
well-serve its master faithfully! How could it have gone lower on
its belly? How can a man stoop lower than he is low? do more than
put his extremities in the place of the head he has? than make his
head his lower extremity? When I have taken up this paper with my
cuffs turned up, I have heard the gurgling of the sewer through
every column. I have felt that I was handling a paper picked out of
the public gutters, a leaf from the gospel of the gambling-house,
the groggery, and the brothel, harmonizing with the gospel of the
Merchants' Exchange.

  The majority of the men of the North, and of the South and East
and West, are not men of principle. If they vote, they do not send men
to Congress on errands of humanity; but while their brothers and
sisters are being scourged and hung for loving liberty, while- I might
here insert all that slavery implies and is- it is the mismanagement
of wood and iron and stone and gold which concerns them. Do what you
will, O Government, with my wife and children, my mother and
brother, my father and sister, I will obey your commands to the
letter. It will indeed grieve me if you hurt them, if you deliver them
to overseers to be hunted by bounds or to be whipped to death; but,
nevertheless, I will peaceably pursue my chosen calling on this fair
earth, until perchance, one day, when I have put on mourning for
them dead, I shall have persuaded you to relent. Such is the attitude,
such are the words of Massachusetts.

  Rather than do thus, I need not say what match I would touch, what
system endeavor to blow up; but as I love my life, I would side with
the light, and let the dark earth roll from under me, calling my
mother and my brother to follow.

  I would remind my countrymen that they are to be men first, and
Americans only at a late and convenient hour. No matter how valuable
law may be to protect your property, even to keep soul and body
together, if it do not keep you and humanity together.

  I am sorry to say that I doubt if there is a judge in
Massachusetts who is prepared to resign his office, and get his living
innocently, whenever it is required of him to pass sentence under a
law which is merely contrary to the law of God. I am compelled to
see that they put themselves, or rather are by character, in this
respect, exactly on a level with the marine who discharges his
musket in any direction he is ordered to. They are just as much tools,
and as little men. Certainly, they are not the more to be respected,
because their master enslaves their understandings and consciences,
instead of their bodies.

  The judges and lawyers- simply as such, I mean- and all men of
expediency, try this case by a very low and incompetent standard. They
consider, not whether the Fugitive Slave Law is right, but whether
it is what they call constitutional. Is virtue constitutional, or
vice? Is equity constitutional, or iniquity? In important moral and
vital questions, like this, it is just as impertinent to ask whether a
law is constitutional or not, as to ask whether it is profitable or
not. They persist in being the servants of the worst of men, and not
the servants of humanity. The question is, not whether you or your
grandfather, seventy years ago, did not enter into an agreement to
serve the Devil, and that service is not accordingly now due; but
whether you will not now, for once and at last, serve God- in spite of
your own past recreancy, or that of your ancestor- by obeying that
eternal and only just CONSTITUTION, which He, and not any Jefferson or
Adams, has written in your being.

  The amount of it is, if the majority vote the Devil to be God, the
minority will live and behave accordingly- and obey the successful
candidate, trusting that, some time or other, by some Speaker's