What is the
character of that calm which follows when the law and the
slaveholder prevail? I regard this event as a touchstone designed to
bring out, with glaring distinctness, the character of this
government. We needed to be thus assisted to see it by the light of
history. It needed to see itself. When a government puts forth its
strength on the side of injustice, as ours to maintain slavery and
kill the liberators of the slave, it reveals itself a merely brute
force, or worse, a demoniacal force. It is the head of the
Plug-Uglies. It is more manifest than ever that tyranny rules. I see
this government to be effectually allied with France and Austria in
oppressing mankind. There sits a tyrant holding fettered four millions
of slaves; here comes their heroic liberator. This most hypocritical
and diabolical government looks up from its seat on the gasping four
millions, and inquires with an assumption of innocence: "What do you
assault me for? Am I not an honest man? Cease agitation on this
subject, or I will make a slave of you, too, or else hang you."
We talk about a representative government; but what a monster of a
government is that where the noblest faculties of the mind, and the
whole heart, are not represented! A semihuman tiger or ox, stalking
over the earth, with its heart taken out and the top of its brain shot
away.
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