Page:The Homes of the New World- Vol. II.djvu/171

Rh friends, greatly distressed by the new law respecting fugitive slaves, which has annihilated all security for these unfortunates in the United States. Already are slave-catchers from the South in active operation, and thousands of slaves have now left their homes in these Northern States, and have fled to Canada or across the sea to England. Just lately an escaped slave was seized in Boston, and carried back into slavery. The people were in a great ferment, but they made no open opposition. The law commanded it, and they obeyed. But the bells of the city tolled as for a funeral. How I sympathised with my friends in this their country's great sorrow—that now there should not be a single spot of earth within the Union, which can be said to be an asylum for freedom! They are exasperated, not against the South, but against that portion of the people of the North who, for the interests of mammon, or the cotton interest, as the phrase is, have given up this noblest right. The South has fought for an ancient half-won right; the North has no such excuse. I understand and I know their willingness to sacrifice much, and to suffer much, in order to alter these unfortunate circumstances, the result of slavery. But I cannot, in all cases, participate in their views of the question. I am more hopeful than they. I have more faith in the victory of the nobler South and the nobler North. In the great combat between God and mammon this slave-law is indeed a lost battle; but all is not lost with it. I believe with Clay and Webster, that it is one step backward which has been demanded by the necessity of the moment, but only preparatory to a greater advance on the path of freedom. But of all this I have spoken with you in Washington.

Shortly after Clay left Congress for the sea-side, nearly all the measures were carried which he had proposed in his Compromise Bill (the Omnibus Bill)—the omnibus, so to speak, was unhorsed, and left empty, and the votes