Page:The collected works of Theodore Parker volume 8.djvu/132

128 State” of Michigan! America puts a penalty on all the Christian virtues.

Just before the Revolution, Boston was so noble in defence of the rights of her citizens, that in the Parliament of corruption her conduct was despotically stigmatized as a “defiance of all legal authority;” her “inhabitants must be treated as aliens!” Massachusetts could not be governed unless, said an organ of the ministry, “the laws shall be so changed as to give to the kings the appointment of the council, and to the sheriffs the sole power of returning juries.” Mayhew wrote: “God gave the Israelites a king in his anger, because they had not sense enough to like a free commonwealth.” But, in 1850, Boston invited and welcomed a decree of her masters, dictated at the Capitol, which drove more than five hundred of her innocent citizens into exile; nay, in her zeal to make a man a slave, she put chains around her own Court House, and the judges of Massachusetts crawled under on the way each “to his own place!” The ministers—there were a few noble exceptions—preached, Down with God and up with the Fugitive Slave Bill!—preached it and lived it.

The minions of power arrested our own John Hancock, in 1768. The Governor of Massachusetts—appointed by the Crown—the good old State elected no such enemies of Freedom then—with his Chief Justice and other tools of the king, wished “to take off the original incendiarics,” and send Samuel Adams over seas “for trial,” that is, for execution: Edes and Gill, the patriotic printers, “trumpeters of sedition,” and others now of famous memory, authors of “treasonable and seditious writings," were to share the same fate. But such was the force of a righteous public opinion in all New England, that the counsel of the ungodly was carried headlong, and the crafty taken in their own net. Look at Boston now; remember the attempts of the Fugitive Slave Bill Judge last summer to construct a “misdemeanour” out of speeches made in Faneuil Hall against the attempt of his kinsmen to kidnap a man in our own streets! Where is the ancient love of justice and the rights of men which brought our Puritan mothers here, and fired our fathers for the greatest of revolutions! Wait and see!