lone
woman with her silver spoons, and that it did not know its friends from
its foes, and I lost all my remaining respect for it, and pitied it.

"Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a
just man is also a prison. The proper place today, the only place which
Massachusetts has provided for her freer and less desponding spirits, is
in her prisons, to be put out and locked out of the State by her own
act, as they have already put themselves out by their principles. It is
there that the fugitive slave, and the Mexican prisoner on parole, and
the Indian come to plead the wrongs of his race, should find them; on
that separate but more free and honorable ground, where the State places
those who are not with her but against her--the only house in a slave
State on which a free man can abide with honor.

"If any think that their influence would be lost there, and their voices
no longer afflict the ear of the State, that they would not be as an
enemy within its walls, they do not know by how much truth is stronger
than error, nor how much more eloquently and effectively he can combat
injustice who has experienced a little in his own person.

"There will never be a really free and enlightened State until the State
comes to recognize the individual as a higher and independent power,
from which all its own power and authority are derived, and treats him
accordingly."

10. THE SUPREME COURT COULD NOT SAVE SLAVERY

Once before the Supreme Court of the United States tried to save a
decaying social institution--the institution of Slavery. There was a
slave named Dred Scott. He was owned by a resident of Missouri. He was
taken into Minnesota and into Illinois. Illinois was a free State by its
own laws. Minnesota was free by the Missouri Compromise of 1820. Then
his master took Dred Scott back to Missouri, and there Dred Scott tried
to gain his freedom. The case was finally decided by the Supreme Court
of the United States in 1857.

The Supreme Court held (two justices dissenting) that Scott could not
sue in the lower courts because he was not a citizen and, therefore, was
not entitled to any standing in the courts; that at the time of the
formation of the Constitution, negroes descended from negro slaves were
not and could not be citizens in any of the States; and that there was
no power in the existing form of Government to make citizens of such
persons. In the course of his decision, Judge Taney u