Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker volume 6.djvu/93

80 thousand men strong; the Worcester "Freedom Club" came down here to visit us: they all went home, and "order reigns in Warsaw." In South Carolina there is a public opinion stronger than the law. Let Massachusetts send an honoured citizen to Charleston, to remonstrate against an iniquitous statute, and most respectable citizens drive him awav. Coloured citizens of Massachusetts rot in the gaols of Charleston. Northern merchants pay the costs. Boston merchants remonstrated years ago, and the Boston senator did not dare to offer their paper in Congress! Yes, a Boston senator did not dare present the remonstrances of Boston merchants! The South despises us. Do you wonder at the treatment we receive? I wonder not at all. Now, let me say another word—it must be a brief one—of this particular case. When Mr. Burns was kidnapped, a public meeting was called in Faneuil Hall. Who went there? Not one of the men who are accustomed to control public opinion in Boston. If ten of them had appeared on that platform, Mr. Phillips and myself would not have troubled the audience with our speech. We would have yielded the place—to citizens of "eminent gravity" giving their counsel, and there would have been no man carried out of Boston. I could mention ten men, known to every man here, who, if they had been there, would have so made such public opinion, that the Fugitive Slave Bill Commissioner never would have found "evidence" or "law" enough to send Anthony Burns back to Alexandria. There was not one of them there. They did not wish to be there. They cared nothing for freedom!

In general, the blame of this wickedness rests on the city of Boston, much of it on Massachusetts, on New England, and on all the North. But here I must single out some of the individuals who are personally responsible for this outrage.

I begin with the Commissioner. He was the prime mover.

Now, as a general thing, the Commissioners who kidnap men in America have had a proclivity to wickedness. It has been structural, constitutional. Man-stealing was in their bones. It was an osteological necessity. A phreno-