Horace Mann: “The inexorable certificate of a commissioner remands him to bondage and despair.”

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.

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.

Better be debarred from the privilege of voting at all, than to be mocked with the form, while cheated of the substance.

Why, fellow-citizens, the ballot is worse than useless, if it be not FREE!