Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker Slavery volume 5 .djvu/202

190 persons thus left at the mercy of any kidnapper; that officers should have been appointed, at the public cost, to defend these helpless men, and a law passed, punishing any one who should attempt to kidnap a man in this commonwealth. Massachusetts should have done for justice what South Carolina has long ago done for injustice. But Massachusetts had often seen her citizens put into the jails of the North for no crime but their complexion, and looked on with a drowsy yawn. Once, indeed, she did send two persons, one to Charleston and the other to New Orleans, to attend to this matter; both of them were turned out of the South with insult and contempt. After that, Massachusetts did nothing; the commonwealth did nothing; the commonwealth did not even scold: she sat mute as the symbolic fish in the State-house. The Bay State turned non-resistant; "passive obedience" should have been the motto then. So, when a bill was passed, putting the liberty of her citizens at the mercy of a crew of legalized kidnappers, the governor of Massachusetts did nothing. Boston fired her hundred guns under the very eyes of John Hancock’s house; her servile and her rich men complimented their representative for voting away the liberty of nine thousand of her fellow-citizens. Was Boston Massachusetts? It is still the governor.

As the government of Massachusetts did nothing, the next thing would have been for the people to come together in a great mass meeting, and decree, as their fathers had often done, that so unjust a law should not be kept in the old Bay State, and appoint a committee to see that no man was kidnapped and carried off; and, if the kidnappers still insisted on kidnapping our brothers here in Massachusetts, the people could have found a way to abate that nuisance as easily as to keep off the stamped paper in 1765. The commissioners of the Slave Act might as easily be dealt with as the commissioners of the Stamp Act.

I love law, and respect law, and should be slow to violate it. I would suffer much, sooner than violate a statute that was simply inexpedient. There is no natural reason, perhaps, for limiting the interest of money to six per cent., but as the law of Massachusetts forbids more, I would not take more. I should hate to interrupt the course of law, and put violence in its place.