The magistrate asked, “How could you say you believed the woman had a right to her freedom?  You have brought forward no evidence whatever to prove your assertion.”

He replied, “I did not say I believed she had a legal right to her freedom.  That she had a just right to it, I did believe; for I think every human being has a just claim to freedom, unless guilty of some crime.  The system of slavery is founded on the grossest and most manifest injustice.”

“It is sanctioned by the law of the land,” answered the claimant; “and you have no right to fly in the face of the laws.”

Friend Hopper contented himself with saying, “If I have broken any law, I stand ready to meet the consequences.  But no law can make wrong right.”

The speculator spent several days in fruitless search after the fugitive.  When he had relinquished all hopes of finding her, he called on Isaac T. Hopper and offered to manumit her for four hundred dollars.  He replied, “At one time, we would gladly have given that sum; but now the circumstances of the case are greatly changed, and we cannot consent to give half that amount.”  After considerable controversy he finally agreed to take one hundred and fifty dollars.  The money was paid, and the deed of manumission made out in due form.  At parting, the claimant said, with a very bitter smile, “I hope I may live to see you south of the Potomac some day.”

Friend Hopper replied, “Thou hadst better go home and repent of sins already committed, instead of meditating the commission of more.”

When telling this story in after years, he was wont to say, “I am aware that some will disapprove of the part I acted in that case; because they will regard it as inconsistent with the candor which men ought always to practice toward each other.  I can only say that my own conscience has never condemned me for it.  I could devise no other means to save the poor victim.”

Before we decide to blame Friend Hopper more than he blamed himself in this matter, it would be well to imagine how we ourselves should have felt, if we had been witnesses of the painful scene, instead of reading it in cool blood, after a lapse of years.  If a handsome and modest woman stood before us with her weeping little ones, asking permission to lead a quiet and virtuous life, and a pitiless law was about to tear her from husband and children and consign her to the licentious tyrant from whom she had escaped, should we not be strongly tempted to evade such a law by any means that offered at the moment?

It would be wiser to expend our moral indignation on statesmen who sanction and sustain laws so wicked, that just and kind-hearted citizens are compelled either to elude them, or to violate their own honest convictions and the best emotions of their hearts.

THE TENDER MERCIES OF A SLAVEHOLDER.