Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker volume 6.djvu/58

Rh That will presently be the theme of my morning's sermon. Next Sunday, I shall preach on. That is the theme for next Sunday: the other is for to-day. But before I proceed to that, I have some words to say in place of the Scripture lesson, and instead of a selection from the Old Testament prophets.

Since last we came together, there has been a man stolen in this city of our fathers. It is not the first; it may not be the last. He is now in the great slave pen in the city of Boston. He is there against the law of the Commonwealth, which, if I am rightly informed, in such cases prohibits the use of State edifices as United States gaols. I may be mistaken. Any forcible attempt to take him from that barracoon of Boston, would be wholly without use. For besides the holiday soldiers who belong to the city of Boston, and are ready to shoot down their brothers in a just or an unjust cause, any day when the city government gives them its command and its liquor, I understand that there are one hundred and eighty-four United States marines lodged in the Court House, every man of them furnished with a musket and a bayonet, with his side arms, and twenty-four ball cartridges. They are stationed also in a very strong building, and where five men, in a passage-way, about the width of this pidpit, can defend it against five-and-twenty, or a hundred. To "keep the peace," the Mayor, who, the other day "regretted the arrest" of our brother, Anthony Burns, and declared that his sympathies were wholly with the alleged fugitive—and of course wholly against the claimant and the Marshal—in order to keep the peace of the city, the Mayor must become corporal of the guard for kidnappers from Virginia. He must keep the peace of our city, and defend these guests of Boston over the graves, the unmonumented graves, of John Hancock and Samuel Adams.

A man has been killed by violence. Some say he was killed by his own coadjutors: I can easily believe it; there is evidence enough that they were greatly frightened. They were not United States soldiers, but volunteers from the streets of Boston, who, for their pay, went into the