Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker volume 6.djvu/92

Rh My friends, the South treat us as we deserve. They make compromises, and then break them. They say we are cowards. Are they mistaken P They put our seamen in gaol for no crime, but their complexion. We allow it. Then they come to New England, and in Boston steal our fellow-citizens—no! our fellow-subjects, our fellow-slaves. We call out the soldiers to help them I Go into a bear's den, and steal a young cub; and if you take only one, all the full-grown bears in the den will come after you and follow till you die, or they die, or their strength fails, and they must give up the pursuit. The Nebraska Bill has hardly got back to the Senate again when a Virginian comes here to see how much Boston will bear. He brings letters to "eminent citizens of Boston," lodges at the Revere House, and bravely shows himself to the public in the streets. He walks upon the Common, and looks at the eclipse—the eclipse of the sun I mean, not the eclipse of Boston: that he needs no glass to look at, as there is none smoked dark enough to hinder it from dazzling his eyes. He gets two Boston lawyers to help him kidnap a man. He finds a Commissioner, a Probate Officer of Massachusetts, ready to violate the tenure of his own trust, prepared for the work; a Marshal anxious to prove his democracy by stealing a man; he finds newspapers ready to sustain him; the Governor lets him go immolested; the Mayor lends him all the police of the city; and then, illegally and without any authority, against the protestations of the Aldermen, calls out all the soldiers among a hundred and sixty thousand people, in order to send one innocent negro into bondage, and gives them orders, it is said, to shoot down any citizen who shall attempt to pass their lines! The soldiers, half drunk, present their horse-pistols at the heads of women—their thumb on the hammer! They stab horses, and with their sabres slash the heads of men!

When Mr. Burns was first seized by the kidnappers, nearly all the daily newspapers took sides against the fugitive. The city was full of ministers all the week; two Anti^Slavery conventions were held, one of them two