of social
ostracism, which weighs upon this community like a night-mare. We feel
it everywhere. We know that we make sacrifices when we act in this
cause. We feel that we suffer under it. And if this course is persevered
in, I believe that if a man stands at that bar charged with being a
fugitive slave, he will find it difficult to obtain counsel in this city
of Boston, except from a small body of men peculiarly situated.

I think that two years ago no man could have stood before this bar, with
perpetual servitude impending over him, but almost the entire bar would
have come forward for his defence. No man would have dared to decline.
But because of this pressure of political and mercantile interests, it
is said that Henry Long found it difficult to obtain counsel in New
York. His friends sent to Boston to obtain an eminent man here, willing
to brave public feeling by acting as a counsellor in a case of slavery.
I do believe that this danger is to be regarded. For there is, at times,
as much servility in democracies as in monarchies. I was struck with the
remark made by the Earl of Carlisle, in his late letter, that there is
in the United States an absolute submission to the supposed popular
opinion of the hour, greater than he ever knew in any other country in
the world. This is something in which no American can take pride.

The history of democratic governments shows that they may be as
arbitrary as any absolute monarchy. Athens and Paris have, under
democratic forms, been the standing illustrations of tyranny and
arbitrary rule the world over. Those are free governments, in which
there is a government of just laws, whether wrought out through a mixed
government, as in England, or wrought out as here by the people
themselves, and cast into representative forms. And now we see before us
the anomaly, the mortifying contradiction, that it is in Great Britain,
and not in the republic of the United States, with our venerated
Declaration of Independence, that the great principles of Liberty and
Fraternity are practically carried out. I do not mean to reflect upon
any person or persons south or north of a certain geographical line. Our
ancestors have eaten sour grapes, and their childrens' teeth are set on
edge. We are all under the same condemnation. We are all responsible for
these laws--for slavery, in some form or other. Our constitutional
compact makes us responsible, and we cannot escape from our share of the
evil a