le perils and
fatigues, footsore and emaciated, you arrive at last in the States
called Free. You allow yourself little time to rest, so eager are
you to press on further North. You have heard the masters swear with
peculiar violence about Massachusetts, and you draw the inference
that it is a refuge for the oppressed. Within the borders of that
old Commonwealth, you breathe more freely than you have ever done.
You resolve to rest awhile, at least, before you go to Canada. You
find friends, and begin to hope that you may be allowed to remain
and work, if you prove yourself industrious and well behaved.
Suddenly, you find yourself arrested and chained. Soldiers escort
you through the streets of Boston, and put you on board a Southern
ship, to be sent back to your master. When you arrive, he orders you
to be flogged so unmercifully, that the doctor says you will die if
they strike another blow. The philanthropic city of Boston hears the
bloody tidings, and one of her men in authority says to the public:
"Fugitive slaves are a class of foreigners, with whose rights
Massachusetts has nothing to do. It is enough for _us_, that they
have no right to be _here_."[1] And the merchants of Boston cry,
Amen.

[Footnote 1: Said by the U.S. Commissioner, George Ticknor Curtis,
at a Union Meeting, in the Old Cradle of Liberty.]

Legislators of Massachusetts! if _you_ had been thus continually
robbed of your rights by the hand of violence, what would _you_
think of the compact between North and South to perpetuate your
wrongs, and transmit them to your posterity? Would you not regard it
as a league between highwaymen, who had "no rights that you were
bound to respect"? I put the question plainly and directly to your
consciences and your common sense, and they will not allow you to
answer, No. Are you, then, doing right to sustain the validity of a
law for _others_, which you would vehemently reject for _yourselves_
in the name of outraged justice and humanity?

The incidents I have supposed might happen to yourselves if you were
slaves, are not an imaginary accumulation of horrors. The things I
have described are happening in this country every day. I have
talked with many "fugitives from injustice," and I could not, within
the limits of these pages, even hint at a tithe of the sufferings
and wrongs they have described. I have also talked with several
slaveholders, who had emancipated themselves from the hateful
system. Being at a