Page:Anti-slavery and reform papers by Thoreau, Henry David.djvu/85

 74 Anti- Slavery mid Reform Paper's.

could pay thein. They were ripe for her gallows. She has tried a loDg time, she has hung a good many, but never found the right one before.

When I think of him and his six sons, and his son-in- law, not to enumerate the others, enlisted for this fight, proceeding coolly, reverently, humanely to work, for months if not years, sleeping and waking upon it, sum- mering and wintering the thought, without expecting any reward but a good conscience, while almost all America stood ranked on the other side, — I say again tl^art it affects me~as a sublime spectacle. , If he had had any journal advocating ^' his cause" any organ, as the phrase is, monotonously and wearisomely playing the same old tune, and then passing round the hat, it would have been fatal to his efficiency. If he had acted in any way so as to be let alone by the government, he might jhave been suspected. It was the fact that the tyrant Tnust give place to him, or he to the tyrant, that distin- guished him from all the reformers of the day that I know.

Ir^t was his peculiar doctrine that a man has a perfect /right to interfere by force with the slaveholder, in order / to rescue the slave. I agree with hinij They who are I continually shocked by slavery have some right to be y shocked by the violent death of the slaveholder, but no others. Such will be more shocked by his life than by his death.xi I shall not be forward to think him mistaken in his metliod who quickest succeeds to liberate the slave.J I speak for the slave when I say, that I prefer the phi- lanthropy of Captain Brown to that philanthropy which neither shoots me nor liberates me. At any rate, I do not think it is quite sane for one to spend his whole life