Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker Slavery volume 5 .djvu/228

216 applied to was a little shy of the business. Yet that commissioner is not a very scrupulous man. I mean in the various parties he has wriggled through, he has not left the reputation of any excessive and maidenly coyness in moral matters, and a genius for excessive scrupulousness as to means or ends. Even a hunker minister informed me that he "would certainly aid a fugitive." But, after the Union Meeting, the clouds of darkness gathered together, and it set in for a storm; the kidnappers went and rough-ground their sword on the grindstone of the church, a navy chaplain turning the crank; and all our hopes fell to the ground.

The relentless administration of Mr Fillmore has been as cruel as the law they framed. Mr Webster has thrust the red-hot iron hook into the flesh of thousands of his fellow-citizens. He and his kidnappers came to a nation scattered and peeled, meted out and trodden down; they have ground the poor creatures to powder under their hoof. I wish I could find an honourable motive for such deeds, but hitherto no analysis can detect it, no solar microscope of charity can bring such a motive to light. The end is base, the means base, the motive base.

Yet one charge has been made against the Government, which seems to me a little harsh and unjust. It has been said the administration preferred low and contemptible men as their tools; judges who blink at law, advocates of infamy, and men cast off from society for perjury, for nameless crimes, and sins not mentionable in English speech; creatures "not so good as the dogs that licked Lazarus's sores; but, like flies, still buzzing upon anything that is raw." There is a semblance of justice in the charge: witness Philadelphia, Buffalo, Boston; witness New York. It is true for kidnappers the Government did take men that looked "like a bull-dog just come to man^s estate;" men whose face declared them, "if not the devil, at least his twin-brother." There are kennels of the courts wherein there settles down all that the law breeds most foul, loathsome, and hideous and abhorrent to the eye of day; there