shall eat the fruit of his hands.  Is not your cause developing like the spring?  Yours has been a long and rigorous winter.  The chill of contempt, the frost of adversity, the blast of persecution, the storm of oppression—­all have been yours.  There was no substance to be found—­no prospect to delight the eye or inspire the drooping heart—­no golden ray to dissipate the gloom.  The waves of derision were stayed by no barrier, but made a clear breach over you.  But now—­thanks be to God! that dreary winter is rapidly hastening away.  The sun of humanity is going steadily up from the horizon to its zenith, growing larger and brighter, and melting the frozen earth beneath, its powerful rays.  The genial showers of repentance are softly falling upon the barren plain; the wilderness is budding like the rose; the voice of joy succeeds the cotes of we; and hope, like the lark, is soaring upward and warbling hymns at the gate of heaven.  William Lloyd Garrison.

“From Words of Encouragement to the Opprest.”

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Listen to the voice of justice and of reason; it cries to us that human judgments are never certain enough to warrant society in giving death to a man convicted by other men liable to error.  Had you imagined the most perfect judicial system; had you found the most upright and enlightened judges, there will always remain some room for error or prejudice.  Why interdict to yourselves the means of reparation?  Why condemn yourself to powerlessness to help opprest innocence?  What good can come of the sterile regrets, these illusory reparations you grant to a vain shade, to insensible ashes?  They are the sad testimonials of the barbarous temerity of your penal laws.  To rob the man of the possibility of expiating his crime by his repentance or by acts of virtue; to close to him without mercy every return toward a proper life, and his own esteem; to hasten his descent, as it were, into the grave still covered with the recent blotch, of his crime, is in my eyes the most horrible refinement of cruelty.  MAXIMILIEN Marie Isidore Robespierre.

From “Against Capital Punishment.”

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And love, young men, love and venerate the ideal.  The ideal is the word of God.  High above every country, high above humanity, is the country of the spirit, the city of the soul, in which all are brethren who believe in the inviolability of thought and in the dignity of our immortal soul; and the baptism of this fraternity is martyrdom.  From that high sphere spring the principles which alone can redeem the peoples.  Arise for the sake of these, and not from impatience of suffering or dread of evil.  Anger, pride, ambition, and the desire of material prosperity, are common alike to the peoples and their oppressors, and even should you conquer with these to-day, you would fall again to-morrow; but principles