Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker Slavery volume 5 .djvu/199

Rh posterity may never have reason to charge the present times with the guilt of tamely giving them away."

It was "voted unanimously that the same be accepted." This is the earliest use of the phrase "inherent and unalienable rights of the people" which I have yet found. It has the savour of James Otis, who had "a tongue of flame and the inspiration of a seer." It dates from Boston, and the eighteenth day of September, eighty-five years before the passage of the Fugitive Slave Bill. In 1850 where was the town-meeting of '65? James Otis died without a son; but a different man sought to "fence in" the Slave Act, and fence men from their rights.

The passage of the Fugitive Slave Bill was a sad event to the coloured citizens of the State. At that time there were 8975 persons of colour in Massachusetts. In thirty-six hours after the passage of the bill was known here, five and thirty coloured persons applied to a well-known philanthropist in this city for counsel. Before sixty hours passed by, more than forty had fled. The laws of Massachusetts could not be trusted to shelter her own children: they must flee to Canada. "This arm, hostile to tyrants," says the motto of the State, "seeks rest in the enjoyment of liberty." Then it ought to have been changed, and read, "This arm, once hostile to tyrants, confederate with them now, drives off her citizens to foreign climes of liberty."

The word "commissioner" has had a traditional hatred ever since our visitation by Sir Edmund Andros; it lost none of its odious character when it became again incarnate in a kidnapper. With Slave Act commissioners to execute the bill, with such "ruling" as we have known on the Slave Act bench, such swearing by "witnesses" on the slave stand, any man's freedom is at the mercy of the kidnapper and his "commissioned" attorney. The one can manufacture "evidence" or "enlarge" it, the other manufacture "law;" and, with such an administration and such creatures to serve its wish, what coloured man was safe? Men in peril have a keen instinct of their danger; the dark-browed mothers in Boston, they wept like Rachel for her first-born, refusing to be comforted. There was no