erating its fetid mass by spontaneous cohesion, and
sinking by the irresistible gravity of rottenness into that
abhorred deep, the lowest, ghastliest pit in all the
subterranean vaults of human sin. It is true the Government
has skimmed the top and dredged the bottom of these kennels
of the courts, taking for its purpose the scum and sediment
thereof, the Squeers, the Fagins, and the Quilps of the law,
the monsters of the court. Blame not the Government; it took
the best it could get. It was necessity, not will, which
made the selection. Such is the stuff that kidnappers must
be made of. If you wish to kill a man, it is not bread you
buy: it is poison. Some of the instruments of Government
were such as one does not often look upon. But, of old time,
an inquisitor was always 'a horrid-looking fellow, as
beseemed his trade.' It is only justice that a kidnapper
should bear 'his great commission in his look.'"

"I pity the kidnappers, the poor tools of men almost as
base. I would not hurt a hair of their heads; but I would
take the thunder of the moral world, and dash its bolted
lightning on this crime of stealing men, till the name of
kidnapping should be like Sodom and Gomorrah. It is piracy
to steal a man in Guinea; what is it to do this in Boston?

"I pity the merchants who, for their trade, were glad to
steal their countrymen; I wish them only good. Debate in
yonder hall has shown how little of humanity there is in the
trade of Boston. She looks on all the horrors which
intemperance has wrought, and daily deals in every street;
she scrutinizes the jails,--they are filled by rum; she
looks into the alms-houses, crowded full by rum; she walks
her streets, and sees the perishing classes fall, mowed down
by rum; she enters the parlors of wealthy men, looks into
the bridal chamber, and meets death: the ghosts of the slain
are there,--men slain by rum. She knows it all, yet says,
'There is an interest at stake!'--the interest of rum; let
man give way! Boston does this to-day. Last year she stole a
man; her merchants stole a man! The sacrifice of man to
money, when shall it have an end? I pity those merchants who
honor money more than man. Their gold is cankered, and their
soul is brass,--is rusted brass. They must come up before