almost cost a young lawyer his
bread and butter to defend the fugitive slave, and when other lawyers
had refused, Lincoln would always plead the cause of the unfortunate
whenever an opportunity presented. "Go to Lincoln," people would say,
when these hounded fugitives were seeking protection; "he's not afraid
of any cause, if it's right."

As Salmon P. Chase left the court room after making an impassioned plea
for the runaway slave girl Matilda, a man looked at him in surprise and
said: "There goes a fine young fellow who has just ruined himself."
But in thus ruining himself Chase had taken the first important step in
a career in which he became Governor of Ohio, United States Senator
from Ohio, Secretary of the United States Treasury, and Chief Justice
of the United States Supreme Court.

At the trial of William Penn for having spoken at a Quaker meeting, the
recorder, not satisfied with the first verdict, said to the jury: "We
will have a verdict by the help of God, or you shall starve for it."
"You are Englishmen," said Penn; "mind your privileges, give not away
your right." At last the jury, after two days and two nights without
food, returned a verdict of "Not guilty." The recorder fined them
forty marks apiece for their independence.

What cared Christ for the jeers of the crowd? The palsied hand moved,
the blind saw, the leper was made whole, the dead spake, despite the
ridicule and scoffs of the spectators.

What cared Wendell Phillips for rotten eggs, derisive scorn, and
hisses? In him "at last the scornful world had met its match." Were
Beecher and Gough to be silenced by the rude English mobs that came to
extinguish them? No! they held their ground and compelled unwilling
thousands to hear and to heed. Did Anna Dickinson leave the platform
when the pistol bullets of the Molly Maguires flew about her head? She
silenced those pistols by her courage and her arguments.

"What the world wants is a Knox, who dares to preach on with a musket
leveled at his head, a Garrison, who is not afraid of a jail, or a mob,
or a scaffold erected in front of his door.

"Storms may howl around thee,
Foes may hunt and hound thee:
Shall they overpower thee?
Never, never, never."

When General Butler was sent with nine thousand men to quell the New
York riots, he arrived in advance of his troops, and found the streets
thronged with an angry mob, which had already hanged more than one man
to lamp-pos