On the record
Why, sir, there is not a respectable village in the country, where, if a juggler or mountebank were to attempt to palm off upon his audience so flimsy a trick as this, he would not be hissed from the stage.
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gutenberg.orgHorace Mann: “Why, sir, there is not a respectable village in the country, where, if a juggler or mountebank were to attempt to palm…”
Editor's note · Context
Mann uses a theatrical metaphor to criticize the acceptance of flimsy justifications for slavery, suggesting that such arguments would be ridiculed in any respectable setting.
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More from Horace Mann
Men of Massachusetts! moral and religious men! lovers of freedom and of your country, were you prepared for this?
Let me read to you the disparaging and contemptuous remark of the address on that great palladium of human liberty, the trial by jury.
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.
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.
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