atisfied of that, they must find him guilty.
No mistaken notions of Justice must induce them to refuse their
verdict--for they are not to make the law, but only help execute it;
and their conscience is so "fallible, especially when the rights of
others are concerned, and may lead them to do great injustice," for
"the annals of the world abound with enormities committed by a narrow
and darkened conscience." They must not ask if it be "religious" to do
so--for to use the words of the most religious of all Americans, a man
of most unspotted life in public and private, "Religion has nothing to
do with politics," and this is a political trial. If there be any
injustice in the law and its execution the blame lies with the makers
thereof not with the jurors, and they may wash their hands as clean as
Pilate's from the blood of Christ. Besides, if there be injustice the
President can pardon the offender, and from his well-known religious
character--which rests on the unbiased testimony of his _own minister_
and the statement of several partisan newspapers published in the very
heat of the election, when men, and especially politicians looking for
office, never exaggerate,--he doubtless "will listen to petitions for
a commutation of punishment!"

But there is no injustice in it--for slavery is part of the _lex
terrae_, the law of the land, protected by the Constitution itself,
which is the _Lex Suprema_--the Supreme Law of the Land, and nearly
eighty years old! Besides, "Slavery is not immoral," not contrary to
the public policy of Massachusetts; and, moreover, the "mother" whom
the criminal actually rescued, was a "foreigner" and "whatever rights
she had, she had no right _here_."[120]

[Footnote 120: See Hon. Judge Curtis's Speech at the Union Meeting in
Faneuil Hall, November 26, 1850.]

But it is not a cruel or an unchristian thing to require a negro
layman to allow his mother to be kidnapped in his own house--especially
if she were a born slave, and so by the very law "a chattel personal
to all uses, intents, and purposes whatever," and of course wholly
divested of all natural rights, even if a colored person ever had
any--for an eminent American minister, of one of the most enlightened
sects in Christendom, has publicly offered to send his own freeborn
mother into bondage for ever!

Moreover, if the jurors do not find a verdict of guilty, then they
themselves are guilty of PERJURY!

So the jury, without leaving their