Perhaps, foreseeing her fate, she practised what, under such circumstances, we might call the virtue of suicide.

When about to be sent to the same market, an older sister went to the shambles to plead with the wretch who owned them, for the love of God, to spare his victims.

Notwithstanding her masters’ pretence that they had bought her with their money, and owned her soul, yet she had wealth, which, though all the earth were “one entire and perfect chrysolite,” it could not buy.

She has heard of Boston and its noble women of old, and she hies hither as to a city of refuge,--as to a sanctuary where virtue has an altar, and where she can lay down her hunted and weary body, and be at rest.

The victim is seized at midnight, under some lying charge, and she is carried before a commissioner, whose conduct, were he a quasi judge, as he pretends to be, would be enough to make every hair of the judicial ermine forever detestable.

And, my friends, the keenest pang in the grief of all this is, that there is no fiction or romance about it.

A commissioner who could bring himself down to send a man to a Georgia cotton-field under this law, the first time trying, could send a virtuous and spotless woman into enforced harlotry the second time; and the prince of darkness only…

Fouler, baser, more ungodly counsel was never uttered, since it was said to our first parents in the garden of Eden, “On the day thou eatest thereof thou shalt not surely die.

And what is it that this long-honored eulogist of liberty, but now its great apostate, blasphemes with the name of “prejudice”?

If there be one sentiment more deeply rooted in the public heart of Massachusetts than any other, more intertwined and grown together with all the fibres of its being, it is the sentiment of liberty.

We have drunk it in with our mothers’ milk; we have imbibed it from all the lessons of the school-room and the teachings of the sanctuary; we have inspired it with the atmosphere we breathe, and our organs have been attuned to it from our…

It was from the love of liberty that our earlier fathers plucked themselves up by the roots from that natal soil into which they had been fastening for centuries.

For this they wandered abroad upon the ocean, deeming its ingulfing surges to be more tolerable than a tyrant’s power.

For this they performed the double task of enduring all privations and dangers, and at the same time of laying the foundations of all our free and glorious institutions; and as the sires were stricken down by toil and death, the sons took…

And when the struggle was ended and the triumph won, they achieved labors of peace not less magnanimous and wonderful than their labors of war.

They were the pattern men of the world;--not aggressive, not submissive; not hostile, not servile; doing right, demanding right; they were the men who would never wield the oppressor’s rod, and would go mad at the touch of his heel.

That ordinance has been cherished in our memories, it has been taught to our children, and we have displayed it before the world both as the pledge and the promise of our devotion to liberty.

I wish to advance one idea for the consideration of all sober, moral, and religious men; and when this idea is duly considered, I trust to its working a revolution in public sentiment.

In selecting men to be our political leaders, we have sometimes committed the gravest moral error.

We have assumed the falsity of a distinction between a man’s public and his private life.

We have supposed that the same individual might be a bad man and a good citizen; might be a patriot and an inebriate, a faithful officer and a debauchee, at the same time; might serve his country during “office hours,” and the powers of…

But I say, as of old, no man can serve God and mammon.

We have been too prone to judge of men by their professions and by their connections.

We seem to have forgotten that the tree is to be known by its fruit, and a man by his life.

If we are to take the Pharisee’s rule, and determine a man’s piety by his creed, and by the number and length of his prayers, then piety will be the cheapest thing in the market, and as worthless as it is cheap.