Wendell Phillips, Theodore C. Pease, Speeches, Lectures and Letters of Wendell Phillips: Volume 1

[74] misused their little brief authority nave, some of them, faded from the public eye,--melted back into the mass of their fellow-slaves. Their names are not worth recalling, for they are not of mark enough to point a moral. Let them pass, all of them ;--the judge who stood head and shoulders above the rest in brutal bearing and the arts of a demagogue; the commissioner, whom the atmosphere of noble enthusiasm about him never betrayed, during all that eventful week, into even the semblance of an honorable emotion; the counsellor who pledged a word, till then undoubted, to that lie for which no guaranty but his could have won even a momentary credence, and the belief of which snapped the last tiny thread of hope that bound the hapless victim to the altar of Massachusetts criminal law.

Yes, let them pass. The few whom charity may hope sinned, unable to “discern between their right hand and their left hand,” and the many who did just right enough to prove they knew their duty, but wallowed in the wrong so greedily as to show how much they loved it. Let History close the record. Let her allow that “on the side of the oppressor there was power,” --power “to frame mis chief by a law” ; that on that side were all the fore;8 of law, and behind those forms, most of the elements of control: wealth, greedy of increase, and anxious for order, at any sacrifice of principle,--priests prophesying smooth things, and arrogating to themselves the name of Christianity,--ambition, baptizing itself statesmanship,--and that unthinking patriotism, child of habit and not of reason, which mistakes government for liberty and law for justice. And, on the other hand, let her allow that, though the Abolitionists were heedful of the hour, and fearless against the prelates of the Church,

to plead her cause,
And from our judge vindicate the laws,