from Slavery in Massachusetts by HD Thoreau
. . .The whole military force of the State is at the service of a Mr. Suttle, a slaveholder from Virginia, to enable him to catch a man whom he calls his property; but not a soldier is offered to save a citizen of Massachusetts from being kidnapped! Is this what all these soldiers, all this training, have been for these seventy-nine years past? Have they been trained merely to rob Mexico and carry back fugitive slaves to their masters?
Every humane and intelligent inhabitant of Concord, when he or she heard those bells and those cannons, thought not with pride of the events of the 19th of April, 1775, but with shame of the events of the 12th of April, 1851. But now we have half buried that old shame under a new one.
. . . I wish my countrymen to consider, that whatever the human law may be, neither an individual nor a nation can ever commit the least act of injustice against the obscurest individual without having to pay the penalty for it. A government which deliberately enacts injustice, and persists in it, will at length even become the laughing-stock of the world.
I hear a good deal said about trampling this law under foot. Why, one need not
go out of his way to do that. This law rises not to the level of the head or
the reason; its natural habitat is in the dirt. It was born and bred, and has
its life, only in the dust and mire, on a level with the feet; and he who walks
with freedom, and does not with Hindoo mercy avoid treading on every venomous
reptile, will inevitably tread on it, and so trample it under foot — and
Webster, its maker, with it, like
the dirt-bug and its ball.
The law will never make men free; it is men who have got to make the law free.
They are the lovers of law and order who observe the law when the government
breaks it.
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