On the record
How can a man pretend to any honest regard for the principle of obedience to law when he is willing, as in the case of this fugitive act, to transcend our constitutional law, and to invade the divine law?
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gutenberg.orgHorace Mann: “How can a man pretend to any honest regard for the principle of obedience to law when he is willing, as in the case of…”
Editor's note · Context
Mann questions the integrity of those who support laws that violate higher moral principles.
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More from Horace Mann
Why, fellow-citizens, the ballot is worse than useless, if it be not FREE!
The man of independent circumstances has this liberty; and no man’s circumstances, not even the poorest and the humblest, should be so dependent as to take it away.
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.
The kidnapper, Alberti, now lies in a Pennsylvania prison for carrying away a mother and her child; but the mother and the child are now groaning under the lash of a southern taskmaster.
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