Page:Anti-slavery and reform papers by Thoreau, Henry David.djvu/81

 70 Anti- Slavery and Reform Papers.

another shot through, he felt the pulse of his dying son with one hand, and held his rifle with the other, and commanded his men with the utmost composure, en- couraging them to be firm, and to sell their lives as dear as they could. Of the three white prisoners, Brown, Stephens, and Coppic, it was hard to say which was most firm/^ Almost the first Northern men whom the slaveholder has learned to respect ! The testimony of Mr. Yallandigham, though less valuable, is of the same purport, that " it is vain to underrate either the man or his conspiracy. . . . He is the farthest possible removed from the ordinary ruffian, fanatic, or madman.'^ ^^ All is quiet at Harper^s Ferry,^^ say the journals.

What is the character of that calm which follows when the law and the slaveholder prevail ? I regard this event as a touchstone designed to bring out, with glaring distinctness, the character of this government. We needed to be thus assisted to see it by the light of history. It needed to see itself. yWhen a government / puts forth its strength on the side of injustice, as ours to I maintain slavery and kill the liberators of the slave, it reveals itself a merely brute force, or worse, a demoniacal ^ force. / It is the head of the Plug-Uglies. It is more manifest than ever that tyranny rules. I see this govern- ment to be effectually allied with France and Austria in oppressing mankind. There sits a tyrant holding fet- tered four millions of slaves ; here comes their heroic liberator. This most hypocritical and diabolical govern- ment looks up from its seat on the gasping four millions, and inquires with an assumption of innocence: "What