Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker volume 6.djvu/284

Rh St. Domingo must next fall a prey to American lust for land.

Then we shall cany out the Fugitive Slave Bill in the North as never before. In 1836, Mr. Curtis asked the Supreme Court of Massachusetts to decree that a slaveholder from Louisiana might take his bondman to Boston as a slave, hold him as a slave, sell him as a slave, or, as a slave, carry him back. In 1855, Mr. Kane decreed that a slave-holder might bring his slave into a free State, and keep him there as long as he would in transitu. Then we must have laws to enforce these demands: Congress will legislate, and the Supreme Court will rule to put Slavery into every Northern State. In the beginning of June, 1854, this same Mr. Curtis, then become a judge, gave a "charge," in which he made it appear that, to make a speech in Faneuil Hall against kidnapping was "a misdemeanour." Yes, if a Massachusetts minister sees his parishioners kidnapped, and makes a speech in Faneuil Hall against that iniquity, and tells the people that they are slaves of Southern masters, Mr. Justice Curtis says that that man has committed a crime, to be punished by imprisonment for twelve months, and a fine of three hundred dollars! By-and-by, that charge will be "good common law:" all lawyers will be slave-hunters; all judges of the Scroggs family; all court-houses girt with chains; all the newspapers administration and Satanic; all the Trinitarian doctors of divinity will take a South-side view of wickedness in high places; all the Nothingarian doctors of divinity will send back their mothers—for a consideration! And then what becomes of freedom of speech, freedom to worship God? What of unalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness? They all perish; and the mocking of tyrants rings round the land: "We meant to subdue you, scoffs one; "I said, ’We will crush out humanity,'" laughs forth another. Where, then, is America? It goes where Korah, and Dathan, and Abiram are said to have gone long ago. The earth will open her mouth and swallow us up; the justice of God will visit us—our crime greater than that of Sodom and Gomorrah—for we shall have committed high treason against the dearest rights of man! He will rain on us worse than fire and brimstone; our name shall rot in the Dead Sea of