When, in evil days, further encroachments are meditated against human rights, these old measures will be cited as a sanction for new aggressions; and, in my view, they will always be found broad enough, and bad enough, to cover almost any nameable assault upon human liberty.
Mann warns that past legislative measures could justify future violations of human rights.
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These are but specimens of what the Fugitive Slave law has already done, before the public mind has become familiarized with its brutalities, and while there is yet some sensibility to the claims of justice and mercy left among us.
I answer, that this difference which they so be-little and disparage will often be all the difference between freedom and bondage, between life and death, between honor and infamy, between happiness and perdition.
Why, fellow-citizens, the ballot is worse than useless, if it be not FREE!
A southern slave stands higher, politically, than a northern laborer, if the latter must vote as his employer dictates.
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