Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker volume 6.djvu/324

Rh itself. The act was consistent. They who had crouched to Senator Mason, and answered at the roll-call of his slaves, how could they publish a manly speech rebuking their "complimentary flunkeyism!" These two acts may make you doubt what would be the fate of the slave power's measures if left to Boston alone; but they make me sure what it would be if left to the three classes I have just now named.

But will these measures succeed, even with such help? If I had stood in this spot on the 29th of January, 1850, and foretold as prophecy what is history to-day, would you have believed me, Mr. President? Ladies and gentlemen, you could not credit it: that Mason's Bill, proposed the week before, would become a law; that Boston would ever be the haunt of man-stealers, her Court-House a barracoon, Faneuil Hall crammed with soldiers hired to steal a negro boy; that her Judge of Probate would forego the benevolence of his nature, or at least of his office, and become a kidnapper, and even a pretended anti-Slavery Governor keep him in office still! No, you could not believe that Wendell Phillips would ever be brought to trial for a "misdemeanor," because, in the cradle of liberty, he declared it wrong for a Judge of Probate to turn kidnapper! No, you would not hear the prediction that the Missouri Compromise would be repealed, the Kansas-Nebraska Act be passed, and the military arm of the United States, lengthened out with Border ruffians, would be stretched forth to force Slavery into Kansas with the edge of the sword. You would have said, "The Dred Scott decision is impossible; the Supreme Court cannot declare that no coloured man is a citizen of the United States,—that the Constitution itself puts Slavery into every territory, spite of local legislation, spite of Congress itself, spite of the people's will! Should they attempt so foul a wrong, the next Convention of the Northern Democrats would rend the Court asunder! Caleb Cushing would war against it!" "What have we seen abroad ; what do some of you hear in this hall, day out, day in? On the 29th of January, 1858, is it more unlikely that the Federal Government will decree these three new measures,—to establish Slavery in all the North, to conquer and enslave the Southern part of the continent, to restore the slave trade? The