en and there it will not avail you to have
compromised truth, justice, love, but to have kept them.
Righteousness only is the salvation of a State; that only of
a man."[210]

[Footnote 210: 2 Occasional Sermons, 239, 240.]

All that was before the bill passed, but how easy it would be for
Judge Jeffreys or Judge Curtis, Judge Sprague or Judge Scroggs, to
construct it into a "misdemeanor," "resisting an officer!"

After the fugitive slave bill passed, on the 22d of September, 1850,
not forty-eight hours after the Judge's friends had fired their
jubilant cannon at the prospect of kidnapping the men who wait upon
their tables, I preached a "Sermon of the Function and Place of
Conscience in relation to the Laws of Man, a sermon for the times." I
said this:--

"If a man falls into the water and is in danger of drowning,
it is the natural duty of the bystanders to aid in pulling
him out, even at the risk of wetting their garments. We
should think a man a coward who could swim, and would not
save a drowning girl for fear of spoiling his coat. He would
be indictable at common law. If a troop of wolves or tigers
were about to seize a man, and devour him, and you and I
could help him, it would be our duty to do so, even to peril
our own limbs and life for that purpose. If a man undertakes
to murder or steal a man, it is the duty of the bystanders
to help their brother, who is in peril, against wrong from
the two-legged man, as much as against the four-legged
beast. But suppose the invader who seizes the man is an
officer of the United States, has a commission in his
pocket, a warrant for his deed in his hand, and seizes as a
slave a man who has done nothing to alienate his natural
rights--does that give him any more natural right to enslave
a man than he had before? Can any piece of parchment make
right wrong, and wrong right?

"The fugitive has been a slave before: does the wrong you
committed yesterday, give you a natural right to commit
wrong afresh and continually? Because you enslaved this
man's father, have you a natural right to enslave his child?
The same right you would have to murder a man because you
butchered his father first. The right to murder is as much
transmissible by inheritance as the right to enslave! It is
plain to me that it is the natural duty of citi