character of that calm which follows when the law and the slaveholder
prevail? I regard this event as a touchstone designed to bring
out, with glaring distinctness, the character of this government.
We needed to be thus assisted to see it by the light of history.
It needed to see itself. When a government puts forth its strength
on the side of injustice, as ours to maintain slavery and kill the
liberators of the slave, it reveals itself a merely brute force, or
worse, a demoniacal force. It is the head of the Plug-Uglies. It
is more manifest than ever that tyranny rules. I see this government
to be effectually allied with France and Austria in oppressing
mankind. There sits a tyrant holding fettered four millions of
slaves; here comes their heroic liberator. This most hypocritical
and diabolical government looks up from its seat on the gasping
four millions, and inquires with an assumption of innocence: "What
do you assault me for? Am I not an honest man? Cease agitation
on this subject, or I will make a slave of you, too, or else hang
you."

We talk about a representative government; but what a monster of
a government is that where the noblest faculties of the mind, and
the whole heart, are not represented. A semi-human tiger or ox,
stalking over the earth, with its heart taken out and the top of
its brain shot away. Heroes have fought well on their stumps when
their legs were shot off, but I never heard of any good done by
such a government as that.

The only government that I recognize,--and it matters not how few
are at the head of it, or how small its army,--is that power that
establishes justice in the land, never that which establishes
injustice. What shall we think of a government to which all the