Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker Slavery volume 5 .djvu/201

Rh ye wretches who contrived, as well as you who executed, the inhuman deed! do you not feel the goads and stings of conscious guilt pierce through your savage bosoms? Though some of you may think yourselves exalted to a height that bids defiance to the arms of human justice, and others shroud yourselves beneath the mask of hypocrisy, and build your hopes of safety on the low arts of cunning, chicanery, and falsehood; yet do you not sometimes feel the gnawings of that worm which never dies? Do not the injured shades of Maverick, Gray, Caldwell, Attucks, and Carr, attend you in your solitary walks, arrest you even in the midst of your debaucheries, and fill even your dreams with terror?

"Ye dark, designing knaves! ye murderers! parricides! how dare you tread upon the earth which has drank in the blood of slaughtered innocents, shed by your wicked hands? How dare you breathe that air which wafted to the ear of Heaven the groans of those who fell a sacrifice to your accursed ambition? But if the labouring earth doth not expand her jaws; if the air you breathe is not commissioned to be the minister of death; yet hear it, and tremble! the eye of Heaven penetrates the darkest chambers of the soul; traces the leading clue through all the labyrinths which your industrious folly has devised; and you, however you may have screened yourselves from human eyes, must be arraigned, must lift your hands, red with the blood of those whose deaths you have procured, at the tremendous bar of God."

But the Boston kidnapping was done by Boston men. The worst of the kidnappers were natives of the spot. It was done by volunteers, not impressed to the work, but choosing their profession,—loving the wages of sin,—and conscious of the loathing and the scorn they are all sure to get, and bequeath to their issue. They did it deliberately; it was a cold-blooded atrocity: they did it aggressively, not in self-defence, but in self degradation. They did it for their pay: let them have it; verily, they shall have their reward.

When the Fugitive Slave Bill became a law, it seems to me the governor ought to have assembled the Legislature; that they should have taken adequate measures for protecting the eight thousand nine hundred and seventy-five