The application of it would at once annul the Fugitive Slave Act, and abolish slavery.  That Act reverses the maxim.  It commands what is wrong, and forbids what is right.  It commands us to trample on the weak and defenceless, to persecute the oppressed, to be accomplices in defrauding honest laborers of their wages.  It forbids us to shelter the homeless, to protect abused innocence, to feed the hungry, to “hide the outcast.”  Let theological casuists argue as they will, Christian hearts will shrink from thinking of Jesus as surrendering a fugitive slave; or of any of his apostles, unless it be Judas.  Political casuists may exercise their skill in making the worse appear the better reason, still all honest minds have an intuitive perception that no human enactment which violates God’s laws is worthy of respect.  By what law of God can we justify the treatment of Margaret Garner? the surrender of Sims and Burns? the pitiless persecution of that poor little “famished hand”?

There is another consideration, which ought alone to have sufficient weight with us to deter us from attempting to carry out this tyrannical enactment.  All history, and all experience, show it to be an immutable law of God, that whosoever injures another, injures himself in the process.  These frequent scuffles between despotism and freedom, with despotism shielded by law, cannot otherwise than demoralize our people.  They unsettle the popular mind concerning eternal principles of justice.  They harden the heart by familiarity with violence.  They accustom people to the idea that it is right for Capital to own Labor; and thus the reverence for Liberty, which we inherited from our fathers, will gradually die out in the souls of our children.  We are compelled to disobey our own consciences, and repress all our humane feelings, or else to disobey the law.  It is a grievous wrong done to the people to place them between these alternatives.  The inevitable result is to destroy the sanctity of law.  The doctrine that “might makes right,” which our rulers consent to teach the people, in order to pacify slaveholders, will come out in unexpected forms to disturb our own peace and safety.  There is “even-handed justice” in the fact that men cannot aid in enslaving others, and themselves remain free; that they cannot assist in robbing others, without endangering their own security.

Moreover, there is wrong done, even to the humblest individual, when he is compelled to be ashamed of his country.  When the judge passed under chains into Boston Court House, and when Anthony Burns was sent back into slavery, I wept for my native State, as a daughter weeps for the crimes of a beloved mother.  It seemed to me that I would gladly have died to have saved Massachusetts from that sin and that shame.  The tears of a secluded woman, who has no vote to give, may appear to you of little consequence.  But assuredly it is not well with any Commonwealth, when her daughters weep over her degeneracy and disgrace.