Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker Slavery volume 5 .djvu/180

168 courts of justice are popular bodies, nowhere are judges more respected than in New England. No officer, constable or sheriff, hangman or jail-keeper, is unpopular on account of his office. Nay, it is popular to inform against your neighbour when he violates the law of the land. This is not so in any other country of the Christian world; but the informer is infamous everywhere else.

Why are we thus loyal to law? First, because we make the laws ourselves, and for ourselves; and next, because the laws actually represent the conscience of the people, and help them keep the laws of God. The value of human laws is only this—to conserve the great eternal law of God; to enable us to keep that; to hinder us from disobeying that. So long as laws do this we should obey them: New England will be loyal to such laws.

But the fugitive slave law is one which contradicts the acknowledged precepts of the Christian religion, universally acknowledged. It violates the noblest instincts of humanity; it asks us to trample on the law of God. It commands what nature, religion, and God alike forbid; it forbids what nature, religion, and God alike command. It tends to defeat the object of all just human law; it tends to annihilate the observance of the law of God. So faithful to God, to religion, to human nature, and in the name of law itself, we protest against this particular statute, and trample it under our feet. Who is it that oppose the fugitive slave law? Men that have always been on the side of "law and order," and do not violate the statutes of men for their own advantage. This disobedience to the fugitive slave law is one of the strongest guarantees for the observance of any just law. You cannot trust a people who will keep law, because it is law; nor need we distrust a people that will only keep a law when it is just. The fugitive slave law itself, if obeyed, will do more to overturn the power of human law, than all disobedience to it—the most complete. Then as to dissolution of the Union. I [have] thought if any State wished to go, she had a natural right to do so. But what States wished to go? Certainly not New England: by no means. Massachusetts has always been attached to the Union,—has made sacrifices for it. In 1775, if she had said, "There shall be no Revolution," there