is once
well done is done forever. But we love better to talk about it: that
we say is our mission. Reform keeps many scores of newspapers in
its service, but not one man. If my esteemed neighbor, the State's
ambassador, who will devote his days to the settlement of the question
of human rights in the Council Chamber, instead of being threatened with
the prisons of Carolina, were to sit down the prisoner of Massachusetts,
that State which is so anxious to foist the sin of slavery upon her
sister--though at present she can discover only an act of inhospitality
to be the ground of a quarrel with her--the Legislature would not wholly
waive the subject the following winter.

Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a
just man is also a prison. The proper place to-day, 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 in 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. Cast your whole vote, not a
strip of paper merely, but your whole influence. A minority is powerless
while it conforms to the majority; it is not even a minority then; but
it is irresistible when it clogs by its whole weight. If the alternative
is to keep all just men in prison, or give up war and slavery, the State
will not hesitate which to choose. If a thousand men were not to pay
their tax-bills this year, that would not be a violent and bloody
measure, as it would be to pay them, and enable the State to commit
violence and shed innocent blood. This is, in fact, the definition of a
peaceable revolution, if any such is possible. If the tax-gatherer, or
any other public officer, asks me, as one has done, "But what shall
I do?" my answer i